JEWISH WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES DURING THEIR INTERNMENT IN AUSCHWITZ
by
ELIZABETH ANN BRYANT
(Under the Direction of Miranda Pollard)
ABSTRACT
This study analyzes eleven memoirs written by female,
Jewish Auschwitz survivors to demonstrate that their experiences
within the camp were complex.
Though similar to men’s in some
ways, only women had to cope with sex specific issues such as
pregnancy, the threat of infertility, or amenorrhea.
Other
experiences, such as the shaving of their heads, affected women
differently than men.
By studying the voices of these eleven
women, while recognizing they cannot and should not speak for
all females who were interned in Auschwitz, this study proves
that their experiences were dissimilar enough so that male
Auschwitz survivors should not be allowed to continue to speak
for all who survived.
INDEX WORDS:
Holocaust, Auschwitz, Women, Survivors, Jews,
Memoirs, World War II, Poland, Concentration
Camp, Extermination Center, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf
Hoess, Josef Mengele, Ruth Kluger, Lucille
Eichengreen, Isabella Leitner, Olga Lengyel, Ruth
Elias, Sophie Weisz Miklos, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk,
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Eva Mozes Kor, Livia
Bitton Jackson, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
JEWISH WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES DURING THEIR INTERNMENT IN AUSCHWITZ
by
ELIZABETH ANN BRYANT
BA, Florida State University, 2003
A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of
Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
ATHENS, GEORGIA
2005
© 2005
Elizabeth Ann Bryant
All Rights Reserved
JEWISH WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES DURING THEIR INTERNMENT IN AUSCHWITZ
by
ELIZABETH ANN BRYANT
Electronic Version Approved:
Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
August 2005
Major Professor:
Miranda Pollard
Committee:
David D. Roberts
John Morrow
DEDICATION
I would like to dedicate this work to Adam Morgenstern, who
spent many hours editing, making suggestions, and re-reading the
changes that I put in place (when I am sure there was something
more interesting on TV.)
I love you.
I would also like to thank my parents for all of their help
and support throughout the entire MA process.
Ethan Grossman, thanks for answering all of my queries
about Judaism, as random and simplistic as they might have been
at times.
Dr Whigham, your smiles, dirty jokes, and encouraging words
kept my spirits up and gave me a laugh when I needed it most.
I would also like to thank all of my committee members for
all of their helpful feedback and support.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While I was at the University of Georgia, the following
professors influenced me tremendously: Keisha Thomas
(Psychology), Amy Ross (Geography), and Blaise Parker (Women’s
Studies).
You are all amazing, inspiring women.
for all of your help and support.
Thanks so much
I only hope I can become half
as good of a professor as you are
I also would like to thank all of my professors at Florida
State, especially Jim Jones.
You taught me all that I know and
I could never have made it this far without you.
to coming back
v
I look forward
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................v
CHAPTER
1
Introduction ............................................1
Rena Kornreich Gelissen ..............................11
Ruth Elias ...........................................12
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch ...............................12
Olga Lengyel .........................................13
Sophie Weisz Miklos ..................................13
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk .................................14
Livia Bitton Jackson .................................14
Isabella Leitner .....................................14
Ruth Kluger ..........................................14
Eva Mozes Kor ........................................15
Lucille Eichengreen ..................................15
Final Thoughts .......................................15
2
Auschwitz ..............................................17
3
Arrival and Processing .................................26
4
Daily Life .............................................38
Roll Call ............................................39
Latrines .............................................40
vi
Labor ................................................43
Food .................................................49
Organizing ...........................................54
Violence and Death ...................................56
Other Activities .....................................59
5
Maternity and Fertility ................................61
6
Solidarity .............................................82
7
Lesbians ..............................................105
8
Conclusions ...........................................114
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk ................................114
Rena Kornreich Gelissen .............................115
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch ..............................115
Eva Mozes Kor .......................................116
Livia Bitton Jackson ................................116
Sophie Weisz Miklos .................................117
Ruth Kluger .........................................117
Ruth Elias ..........................................118
Lucille Eichengreen .................................118
Isabella Leitner ....................................119
Final Thoughts ......................................119
BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................121
vii
Chapter One:
Introduction
In German controlled territories during the Second World
War, Jewish women faced the double burden of racism and sexism.
While the Nazi state extolled the virtues of “kinder, küche,
kirche” for Aryan women, Jewish women, in contrast, were
vilified as being guilty of racial degeneration.1
As early as
1924, in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler warned his followers about the
dangers of mixing Jewish and Aryan blood.
He cautions,
look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a
result of being contaminated with Jewish blood. Bear in mind the fact
that this poisonous contamination can be eliminated from the national
body only after centuries, or perhaps never. Think further of how the
process of racial decomposition is debasing and in some cases even
destroying the fundamental Aryan qualities of our German people, so
that our cultural creativeness is gradually becoming impotent.2
In particular, Hitler viewed Jewish women as especially
dangerous because of their ability to give birth to new
generations of perceived enemies of the Reich.
In order to
prevent this from happening, Doris Bergen demonstrates that Nazi
1
Gisela Boch, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory
Sterilization, and the State” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar
and Nazi Germany, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 171-172.
2
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939), 459-460.
1
propaganda portrayed Jewish women as using their “sexual wiles
to entice Aryan men to their ruin.”3
Carol Rittner and John Roth assert that the Nazis “insisted
with a vengeance that Jewish motherhood must be eradicated
forever.”4
Once Hitler had obtained power, policies dictating
Jewish women’s abortion rights and maternity rights were
implemented.
In 1935, with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws,
it became illegal for Jews to enter into sexual relationships
with Aryans.
Policies targeting Jewish women, and in particular mothers,
were expanded upon in the concentration camps, especially
Auschwitz.
For Jewish women, passing the initial inspection
when they entered the camp was especially difficult.
The
majority of women arriving on the transports were pregnant, had
children under fourteen, or were older than forty-five and
deemed too old to work by the SS so they were sent immediately
to the gas chambers.
Raul Hilberg theorizes that men were less
likely to immediately be sent to their deaths upon arriving in
Auschwitz because the Nazis needed healthy men to work as a
slave labor force.5
Women who were selected to work as laborers
3
Doris L. Bergen, “Sex, Blood, and Vulnerability: Women Outsiders in GermanOccupied Europe” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 276.
4
Carol Ann Rittner and John K. Roth, Different Voices: Women in the Holocaust,
(New York: Paragon House, 1993), xi.
5
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 19331945, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 126-130.
2
were usually in their twenties and had no children.
According
to camp records, of the 400,000 prisoners in Auschwitz between
1940 and 1945, only 130,000 were women.6
The problem with using
these records is that only those who entered Auschwitz as
workers were officially recorded.
Those who were selected for
death upon arrival were never counted, leaving historians with
an incomplete record of the true number of individuals who were
killed there.
Records indicate that on January 17, 1945 only 16,577
female inmates remained for the final roll call.7
When Soviet
troops liberated Auschwitz ten days later, of the seven thousand
prisoners who were not made to leave by the SS in forced
evacuations, over four thousand were women.8
Though these
individuals were on the brink of death, they had not succumbed
to Hitler’s so-called Final Solution, the objective of which was
to exterminate all European Jews.
In spite of all odds, these
women had survived.
But what constitutes a Holocaust survivor?
A survivor is
not simply someone who lived through World War II under the Nazi
regime.
The term does not include members of communities that
were left intact or people who continued to live in their own
6
Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945 (New York, H. Holt, 1990), xvi.
Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 781-785.
8
Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 805.
7
3
homes throughout the war.9
Instead, a survivor is someone who
lived through the Nazi labor/concentration camps, one of the few
individuals who managed to escape from the camps, and the men
and women who were in hiding for the duration of the war.
In
other words, to be a Holocaust survivor, an individual must have
been a victim of Nazi persecution.
Of the over 1.6 million individuals who were sent to
Auschwitz, only 1% of women who are thought to have survived
have chosen to write about their experiences.
In the words of
Rittner and Roth, much of the “widely read scholarship treats
the Holocaust as if sexual and gender differences” are
irrelevant which explains why, to date, “Holocaust scholarship
as been influenced most frequently by men.”10
This is problematic because what men and women experienced
in Auschwitz was not identical.
According to Myrna Goldenberg,
women and men often experienced “different horrors within the
same hell.”11
Only women had to cope with sex-specific problems
such as amenorrhea, rape, pregnancy, abortions, and invasive
gynecological exams by eager SS ‘doctors’ and Kapos looking for
valuables.
9
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, 187.
Carol Rittner and John Roth, Different Voices, xi, 38.
11
Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender” in
Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998),
327.
10
4
Carol Gilligan believes that
as we have listened for centuries to the voice of men… so we have come
more recently to notice not only the silence of women, but the
difficulty of hearing what they say when they speak. The failure to
see the different realities of women’s lives and to hear the
differences in the voices stems in part from the assumption there is a
single mode of social experience and interpretation.12
By continuing to take male perspectives as “representative of
the experience of all Holocaust victims,” historians
inadvertently continue to silence women.13
Though male Auschwitz
survivors such as Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi
“are exceptional writers,” it is a mistake for historians to
regard their memoirs as “typical of ‘the’ Jewish Holocaust
experience.”14
Without listening to women’s voices, there can
never be an accurate depiction of women’s daily lives in
Auschwitz.
While reading memoirs, it is important to remember that
similar experiences are not identical.
The eleven memoirs
examined in this thesis do not and cannot encompass every aspect
of every woman’s experience in Auschwitz.15
12
No one voice or set
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), 173.
13
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust
(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986), 2-3.
14
Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors,” 327.
15
The memoirs examined are, by date of publication: Olga Lengyel’s Five
Chimneys (1947); Isabella Leitner’s Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of
Auschwitz (1978); Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s Auschwitz: True Tales from a
Grotesque Land (1985); Lucille Eichengreen’s From Ashes to Life: My Memories
of the Holocaust (1994); Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s Rena’s Promise: A Story of
Sisters in Auschwitz (1995); Eva Mozes Kor’s Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr
Mengele’s Twins: The Story of Eva and Miriam Mozes (1995); Livia Bitton
Jackson’s I have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust (1997);
Ruth Elias’s Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel
5
of voices could accomplish such a feat.
Each experience of
every Holocaust victim is unique and deserves individual
commemoration.
With the exception of Olga Lengyel, who published Five
Chimneys in 1947, the rest of these authors waited at least
thirty years after Liberation before they began publishing their
memoirs, with the majority being published in the mid to late
1990s.
With Liberation occurring over sixty years ago, many
survivors seem to feel a sense of urgency to make known one’s
experiences in Auschwitz.
This sense of urgency would explain
why both Sophie Weisz Miklos and Eva Mozes Kor did not have
their works printed by mainstream publishers.
Miklos paid
Author’s Choice Press to publish Paper Gauze Ballerina.
Kor
published her memoir through her organization CANDLES Inc., a
group she founded to find other individuals who were forced to
partake in Dr Mengele’s twin experiments.
This rush to publish in the last ten years is because many
of these women fear that once the final survivor dies, people
will forget the atrocities that occurred in Auschwitz.
With so
few survivors still alive, and knowing that their own death is
also imminent, these women hope that by publishing and making
people remember about the horrors of Auschwitz, that they can
(1998); Sophie Weisz Miklos’s Paper Gauze Ballerina: Memoir of a Holocaust
Survivor (1998); Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s Inherit the Truth: A Memoir of
Survival and the Holocaust (2000); Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust
Girlhood Remembered (2001).
6
prevent a genocide of that magnitude from ever happening again.
Sophie Weisz Miklos recognizes that “the words (I) write here
today will be here when (I) am long gone.”16
Another reason these women may have felt the need to
publish memoirs is that they may have realized that most
individuals only knew the stories of prominent men in Auschwitz,
such as Borowski or Levi.
Though both of these men mention
women in their memoirs, albeit briefly, they cannot give a true
depiction of women’s life in the camps.
The images that are
portrayed, while not necessarily inaccurate, only comprise one
component of women’s experiences.17
It is for this reason that
many women who published their memoirs in the 1990s seem to play
up the gender specificity of issues focusing in depth on
conditions that concern women especially pregnancy and
amenorrhea.
By focusing on these issues, these women seem that
they want to make known that they faced issues that men did not.
For these women, Ellen Fine believes “the literary act” of
writing memoirs was “an act of resistance.”18
It was often a
psychological necessity for them to share with others the
16
Sophie Weisz Miklos, Paper Gauze Ballerina: Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor
(Lincoln, Nebraska: Author’s Choice, 1998), 2.
17
For instance, Borowski, when talking about women in Auschwitz describes how
sex can easily be bought for food. He also mentions the “Puff Houses” where
women prisoners were forced to work as prostitutes. This depiction of women
takes away from the complexity of their experiences and just makes them
sexualized beings.
18
Ellen S. Fine, “Women Writers and the Holocaust: Strategies for Survival” in
Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), 80.
7
experiences that they had once endured.19
Sophie Weisz Miklos
even admits, “without these words, I would not have been able to
go on living.”20
Though Miklos and other female survivors realized that
language had its limitations, they felt that they must try to
recapture their memories because during the Holocaust, the Nazis
killed an estimated six million Jews.
Kenneth Harper believes
that while
the numbers are stultifying… statistics promote a sense of abstraction
divorced from the vagaries of the world, individual life is full of the
peculiarities, quirks, and idiosyncrasies that make for its comedy, its
sadness, its tragedy- its diverse humanity.21
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch wrote because she realized that while her
“story has a happy ending” for “millions of others… there are no
graves to testify that they ever did exist.”22
Thus, for her and
many other survivors the ability to
write their personal testimonies- to bear witness for those… in the
cattle cars whose life stories were to remain unfinished- the mission
of memory has become the survivors’ personal strategy of survival and
ultimately, the justification for their existence.23
Not all survivors are willing to put their memories in print.
Some flatly refuse to represent the Holocaust on the grounds
that any form of artistic depiction could not but betray the
19
Andrew Leak and George Paizis, The Holocaust and the Text, (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 2000), 2.
20
Sophie Weisz Miklos, Paper Gauze Ballerina, 75.
21
Kenneth Harper, “The Literature of Witness,” in Literature, the Arts, and
the Holocaust (Greenwood, Florida: Penkevill, 1987), 241.
22
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth: A Memoir of Survival and the
Holocaust (New York: St Martins Press, 1996), 144.
23
Ellen S. Fine, “Women Writers”, 93-94.
8
actual events.24
Even Ruth Kluger worries in her memoir Still
Alive “that the very act of literature betrays what was
experienced in the Holocaust: don’t words make ‘speakable’ what
is not?”25
One criticism of memoirs is that one should “never trust
memory fully”26 because “no memory is fully primary” especially
when trying to recount events that happened over thirty years
ago.27
As Hayden White once wrote, “a ‘fact’ must be regarded as
‘an event under description’.”28
Herbert Hirsch, a professor of
political science, believes that
any individual attempting to reconstruct his or her own history from
what Langer calls the “ruins of memory” should be aware of the fact
that what they come up with is composed partially of remembered
experiences, partially of events we may have heard about which may be
part of the family or group mythology, partially of things that are
vague and that we even perhaps created from a series of vaguely
remembered events.29
In spite of these reservations, Hirsch goes on to argue that
“despite this possibility, historians agree that personal
recollections” are needed to “construe the individual and
24
Andrew Leak, Holocaust and the Text, 9.
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, (New York:
Feminist Press at City University of New York, 2001), 11.
26
Daniel Schwartz, Imagining the Holocaust, (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1999), 35.
27
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1998), 21.
28
Hayden White as quoted in James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988), 15.
29
Herbert Hirsch, “History as Memory: The Influence of Time and Paradigm” in
The Uses and Abuses of Knowledge: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Scholars’
Conference on the Holocaust and the German Church Struggle, March 7-9, 1993,
(Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1997), 54.
25
9
collective past.”30
Another critique of memoirs from Lawrence
Langer is that the text is a “calculated effort” that allows the
author “more time to phrase” his or her choice of words in order
to appear in the best possible light.31
Despite these
criticisms, memoirs are still “a crucial source for history.”32
This thesis hopes to contribute to the field of women in
Holocaust literature.
Though there have been books written on
literature of the Holocaust, both by and about women, none focus
exclusively on memoirs written by Jewish female Auschwitz
survivors.
Indeed, many of these works seem to lump together
all women survivors, as if there was one universal female
Holocaust experience.
While the differing experiences of many
men are documented, the study of women and the Holocaust seems
to focus exclusively on three women: Anne Frank, Charlotte
Delbo, or Gerda Klein.
While it is important to study their
experiences, it is only by understanding the diversity of the
victims, and the complexity of their experiences, that the
lessons of the Holocaust can be fully integrated into history.33
30
Herbert Hirsch, “History as Memory”, 54.
Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, (New Haven
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1991), 129.
32
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 19.
33
Three examples of excellent books on Holocaust literature are: Lawrence
Langer’s The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s
By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, and Alvin Rosenfeld’s A Double
Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. However, none of these books
concentrates exclusively on women or on Auschwitz survivors. There are few
mentions of women at all in these works, and none would fit the criteria for
inclusion in this thesis (ie Jewish and imprisoned in Auschwitz.) The only
woman mentioned in Langer is Anne Frank, who was sent to Bergen-Belsen.
31
10
The eleven women examined, through the act of writing, all
contribute to historians’ understanding of the Holocaust.
There
were several criteria for choosing the memoirs that were
analyzed: the authors must be women, must be Jewish, and had to
have been interned in Auschwitz.
Also, the memoirs had to be
either written in, or translated into, English.
Other than
that, their life-stories were varied, as described below.
were married, most were not.
One had children, another was
pregnant, but the rest did not have any offspring.
were from Eastern Europe.
continued to differ.
Some
The majority
While in the camps, their experiences
Some were lucky enough to work in
privileged positions; others were forced to perform manual
labor.
Some remained with members of their families throughout
their internment, while others were the lone survivors.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen
Gelissen, a Polish citizen, was only twenty-one when she
volunteered to come to Auschwitz on the first women’s transport
in 1942.
Gelissen claims she came because she believed the Nazi
propaganda that Auschwitz was a labor camp and that she would
only be imprisoned for a few months.
Another reason Gelissen
Ezrahi mentions Frank and Charlotte Delbo, who was in Auschwitz but is not
Jewish. Rosenfeld focuses on Frank, Delbo, and Gerda Klein, who was
imprisoned in several labor camps. It seems, by examining these works, the
experience of every female Holocaust survivor is either equated with men or
generalized as being the same as other women survivors regardless of religion
or place of internment. Other works, such as Carol Rittner and John Roth’s
Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, focus exclusively on women, but
include women from different camps and of different religions.
11
went to Auschwitz was that she was an Orthodox Jew who had
fallen in love with a Christian Pole named Andrzej, who was a
member of the Resistance Movement.
Though he was willing to
convert to Judaism, she knew that her parents would never accept
him so she refused his proposals of marriage even though she
wanted to be his wife.
After hearing of Andrzej’s death, she
became engaged to another man, Schani, but she did not want to
marry him and saw Auschwitz as an escape from her impending
nuptials.
A few weeks after Gelissen arrived, her sister Danka
also volunteered to come to Auschwitz.
Ruth Elias
Elias, a Czechoslovakian, was deported to Auschwitz from
the Theresienstadt ghetto in December 1943.
Her immediate
family had been deported over a year earlier and she had heard
rumors that they had been gassed on arrival.
She and her
husband Koni made the journey together but soon became estranged
because Koni was not interested in Elias’s pregnancy.
While in
Auschwitz, Elias gave birth to a baby girl, who was made an
unwilling participant in one of Josef Mengele’s inhumane
experiments.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
Though a German Jew, Lasker-Wallfisch was categorized as a
Karteihaftlinge, or prisoner with a file, because she and her
sister Renate had been caught forging papers so that they could
12
immigrate to England to be with their sister Marianne.
Wallfisch was transferred to Auschwitz in December 1943.
A
gifted cellist who had studied under Leo Rostal in Berlin, she
auditioned for, and became a member of the camp orchestra.
Her
sister, Renate, arrived in Auschwitz two weeks after LaskerWallfisch, and the two women were reunited.
Olga Lengyel
In 1944, Lengyel volunteered to go to Auschwitz because the
Nazis informed her that they were deporting her husband for
allegedly refusing to distribute German medicine at his
hospital.
Worried about her family being torn apart, Lengyel
insisted on going and had her parents and her children accompany
them.
During the initial selection, Lengyel, still believing
Auschwitz was a labor camp, inadvertently sent her mother and
her sons towards death.
While in Auschwitz, Lengyel worked as a
doctor in the camp infirmary.
Though Jewish, she makes no
mention of her religion in Five Chimneys.
Sophie Weisz Miklos
Miklos, a Romanian, was deported to Auschwitz in March
1944.
Upon arrival, her father was immediately sent to the left
towards death.
She, her mother, and her sister Agnes were only
imprisoned in Auschwitz for six weeks before being transferred
to a labor camp in Stutthof, Germany, where her mother was
dragged to death.
13
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk
Though raised in Poland as a Hasidic Jew, Nomberg-Przytyk
does not mention religion at all in her memoir.
self-identifies as a Communist.
Przytyk arrived in Auschwitz.
Instead, she
On January 13, 1944, Nomberg-
Through her Communist
connections, she was able to secure a job for herself working as
a clerk in the camp infirmary.
Livia Bitton Jackson
Jackson, a Czechoslovakian, was only thirteen when she was
deported to Auschwitz in May 1944.
During the initial
selection, Mengele urged her to lie about her age because he
liked her long, blond hair.
Throughout her time at Auschwitz,
Jackson was able to remain with her mother.
During the final,
forced evacuation in January 1945, she was reunited with Bubi,
her older brother, who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz I.
Isabella Leitner
Leitner arrived in Auschwitz in June 1944.
A Hungarian
Jew, she was fortunate enough to remain with three of her
sisters in Auschwitz, though her mother and baby sister were
sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival.
Ruth Kluger
Kluger, an Austrian Jew, entered Auschwitz in the company
of her mother in May 1944.
Kluger was only twelve, but on the
advice of her mother and a friendly clerk, lied and said her age
14
was fifteen so that she and her mother could be transferred
together to a labor camp.
Eva Mozes Kor
Kor, and her twin sister Miriam, were only nine when they
were deported to Auschwitz from an extremely religious family in
Hungary in 1944.
Though underage, she and her sister’s lives
were spared so they could be guinea pigs in Josef Mengele’s twin
experiments.
The sisters were lucky enough to remain together
throughout their time in Auschwitz, since the rest of their
family was murdered upon arrival.
Lucille Eichengreen
Eichengreen was a German Jew whose family retained Polish
passports, so she was classified as Pole by the Nazis.
lived in the Lodz ghetto for three years.
She
Due to her
connections in the ghetto, she was not sent to Auschwitz until
Lodz was liquidated in August 1944, though her family had been
deported over a year earlier and were killed.
Not long after
her arrival in Auschwitz, she was selected to work at a labor
camp in Germany.
Final Thoughts
Analyzing these eleven memoirs will demonstrate that
women’s experiences in Auschwitz were diverse.
Though, as this
thesis will prove, their experiences in many ways were similar
to men’s, there were many gender specific dimensions that need
15
to be analyzed in order for a complete picture of life in
Auschwitz to emerge.34
34
There is no doubt that the majority of experiences in Auschwitz were shared
by members of both sexes, including violence, humiliations, a lack of food,
having to stand for roll call, work details, and the lack of personal
hygiene. However, women reacted to shared humiliations in different ways
than men. For instance, while the shaving of the inmate’s heads was common
to both sexes, women reacted much worse to this procedure than men. Also,
maternity and fertility issues were gender-specific. As this thesis will
prove, many of the Nazi’s plans were designated to specifically humiliate
women, in there capacity as mothers. Also, women reacted differently to the
conditions within the camps. Where, in male memoirs, selfishness seems to be
the rule, rather than the exception, women seem to have a special bond of
solidarity, even helping those who are total strangers.
16
Chapter Two:
Auschwitz
Ruth Elias recalls her experience when she first arrived at
Auschwitz:
I mustered up some courage and asked one of them, “Where are we?”
Without looking at me, he said, “Auschwitz.” That meant nothing to me.
It was the name of one of the many towns in Poland. I didn’t know how
deeply Auschwitz would be engraved into my very being, so indelibly, it
could never be erased.35
Little did Elias know when she arrived that she had entered what
Ruth Kluger refers to as “the asshole of creation.”36
Oswiecim prior to the German occupation in September 1939
was a town much like any other.
Prior to World War II, this
Polish town “had a flourishing Jewish community.”37
approximately 12,000 residents, 7,000 were Jewish.38
Of the
And yet,
Oswiecim was “the site of the largest mass murder in history”
and became known as the place where over one million Jewish men,
35
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel
(New York: John Wiley, 1998), 107. The “them” she references is a male kapo.
36
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York:
Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001), 111.
37
Daniel R. Schwartz, Imagining the Holocaust, (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1999), 25.
38
Daniel R. Schwartz, Imagining the Holocaust, 25. Yisrael Gutman disagrees
with the number of Jews Schwartz gives and approximates the Jewish population
in Oswiecim to be closer to five thousand. See Yisrael Gutman, “Auschwitz,”
7.
17
women, and children were killed.39
The Germans chose Oswiecim,
which they renamed Auschwitz, as the site of the largest of the
more than ten thousand concentration camps in the Third Reich.40
Auschwitz was located conveniently, from a Nazi point-of-view,
at the junction of several major European railway lines.
The
town also had access to several important raw materials
including coal, water, and lime, which were crucial to the
German war effort.
Rudolf Hoess was appointed commandant of Auschwitz in April
1940.
On June 14, 1940, the first prisoners arrived, mostly
members of the Polish underground, students, and other Polish
intellectuals, though the camp at this point had yet to be
constructed.
These men were forced to build their own living
quarters around old Polish army barracks, and through this
process Auschwitz I was created.
In February 1941, Heinrich
Himmler, leader of the SS, ordered the town of Oswiecim to be
completely cleared of its civilian population so that the camp
had the space so that it could be expanded.
The Jewish
population was forced out and resettled, the preliminary stage
before their eventual deportation back to Auschwitz where they
would be killed with hundreds of thousands of other European
Jews.
According to Hoess, in March 1941, Himmler visited the
39
Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Directed by Laurence Rees. British
Broadcasting Company, 2005. DVD.
40
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), 123.
18
camp for the first time and “started to discuss in earnest the
new tasks he had for Auschwitz.”41
Himmler expected Auschwitz I,
which then held 10,000 men, to be immediately expanded to hold
an additional 30,000 prisoners.
Himmler also ordered the
construction of a camp suitable for 100,000 POWs.
Construction
of this new camp, known as Auschwitz II or Birkenau, did not
start until October 1941, when the first Soviet POWs arrived and
were required to start building the new camp in murderous
conditions.
More than 10,000 Soviet soldiers died during the
construction of Birkenau.
Once construction was complete,
Himmler and the SS decided to expand Auschwitz’s industries
using their newly enslaved labor force.
In January 1942, the Wannsee Conference was held with the
goal of formulating the so-called Final Solution, which included
the ‘resettlement’ of 11 million European Jews to the East.
This effectively sealed the transformation of Auschwitz from a
concentration camp to the major killing center in the Nazi’s
plan for the annihilation of all European Jews.
In February
1942, Hoess, SS architect Karl Bischoff, and Hans Kammler, head
of the central SS buildings office, decided to move the
projected new crematorium from Auschwitz I to Birkenau.
This
crematorium, first used a month later in March 1942, became
known as the ‘little red house’ or ‘bunker one.’
41
It had the
Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz (London: Phoenix Press, 1959), 206.
19
capacity to gas approximately 800 people at a time.
A few weeks
later, the ‘little white house’ or ‘bunker two’ was also
constructed in Birkenau, and had the capacity to kill 1200
individuals at once.
In March 1942, the first female transport arrived in
Auschwitz.
It consisted of 999 German women prisoners and 999
Jewish women from Slovakia.
The Slovakian women, including Rena
Kornreich Gelissen, came to Auschwitz believing Nazi propaganda
that it was a labor camp, and thought that they would be
released within a few months.
Although Auschwitz to this point
had been “an exclusively male institution,” 17,000 women, the
majority of whom were Jewish, arrived between March and midAugust 1942.42
Because of the poor conditions, approximately
5000 of these women died from disease before they were relocated
from the Auschwitz I main camp to Birkenau in August 1942.43
Rena Kornreich Gelissen recalls the transfer:
Birkenau is a cruel awakening. In Auschwitz, there was a lot of death,
but it was not such a daily fact of life. Now we see death every day.
It is a constant like our meals. And there are not just one or two
girls dying, like before, but tens and twenties and losing count.44
As Gelissen notes, the death rate in Birkenau was
extraordinarily high, not just from the gassings, but also from
the high rate of disease.
42
Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History (New York: Public Affairs, 2005),
99.
43
Irena Strzelecka, “Women” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), 394.
44
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
(Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 99.
20
By mid-1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau had become a fully
operational killing center with trains of European Jews arriving
daily.
Yet, it was not until July 1942, two years after
Auschwitz had received its first inmates, that systematic
selections began.
sex.
Upon arrival, prisoners were separated by
Those who were deemed healthy enough by the SS were
selected to work as laborers, and were allowed to enter the
camp.
Those not chosen to work, approximately ninety percent of
each transport, were sent to the crematoria.45
Women were more
likely to be sent immediately to the gas chambers than men,
because men were thought by the SS to be more capable of
performing manual labor.
The few women who were spared,
beginning in August 1942, were sent directly to Birkenau, not
the Auschwitz I main camp.46
Olga Lengyel recalls,
when the selectors told off the deportees on the station platform
“Right!” or “Left!” they were sending them to either Birkenau or
Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a slave camp. Hard as life was at Auschwitz,
it was better than Birkenau. For the latter was definitely an
extermination camp.47
45
Carol Ann Rittner and John K Roth, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust
(New York: Paragon House, 1993), 12.
46
In Birkenau, Sector Bla was the main women’s camp in the Auschwitz compound.
In addition, women were housed in Bllb (the Theresienstadt family camp until
August 1944 then it held exclusively women), Bllc (Hungarian women), Blle
(the Gypsy camp) and Blll (‘Mexico’). After August 1942, no sector in
Auschwitz I was dedicated to women.
47
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz
(Chicago: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1947), 33.
21
Lengyel feels that “prisoners at Birkenau… were merely waiting
their turn to be gassed and cremated.”48
This perception was
prevalent among prisoners because Birkenau contained four
crematoria and the odor of burnt flesh was omnipresent.
The conditions under which women were forced to live in
Birkenau were deliberately degrading and brutal.
Barracks
commonly held 800 to 1000 inmates in a space that was originally
designed as a stable for 52 horses.
Women, such as Rena
Kornreich Gelissen, who had been housed in both camps felt that
conditions in Birkenau were worse than in the Auschwitz I main
camp.
None of the 250 barracks had running water, thus they
quickly became infested with insects and vermin, which led to a
high rate of disease, especially typhus.
Though Auschwitz was a
concentration camp, the conditions in the barracks led directly
to the deaths of many inmates, which was perfectly compatible
with Nazi aims.
By early spring 1943, the Auschwitz concentration camp had
successfully combined the Nazi goals of slave labor and mass
murder.
This policy of “vernichtung durch arbeit” or
“destruction through work” was well understood by its victims.
When prisoners in Auschwitz, or one of its sub-camps, “were no
48
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 34.
22
longer judged useful,” they were sent, in Olga Lengyel’s words,
to Birkenau to “die in the ovens.”49
In addition to the intensive expansion and construction
around Auschwitz I and Birkenau, between 1942 and 1945 forty
sub-camps were established around Auschwitz.
The populations of
these sub-camps ranged from under a dozen to several thousand.
The prisoners worked as slave laborers doing agricultural work,
forestry work, coal mining, producing armaments for the German
war effort, and working in the IG Farben chemical plant.
Yisrael Gutman, a historian of the Holocaust, reminds us that
the
establishment of such a network of satellite camps was necessary
because prisoners could not march more than several kilometers to work,
and mines and other sources of raw materials were often located a
significant distance from the main camp.50
By the early summer of 1943, the process of genocide was
increasingly streamlined in Auschwitz-Birkenau according to Nazi
architectural plans.
In this industrialized killing center,
four specially designed combination gas chambers-crematoria had
the capacity to murder and burn 120,000 men, women, and children
each month.
For each day, this represented 4,416 victims.
49
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 34.
Yisrael Gutman, “Auschwitz- An Overview” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
Camp (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), 17.
50
23
With the construction of new rail tracks leading straight
into Birkenau in May 1944, selections became even easier for the
SS.
Eva Mozes Kor recalls this cynical ‘improvement’:
originally the groups of people selected for the gas chambers walked
the three kilometers or so from the Auschwitz station to the Birkenau
camp. In early 1944, a direct rail line was built to the Birkenau
camp, stopping practically at the door of the crematorium.51
With the construction of these new rail lines, women became even
more susceptible to being murdered on arrival because the SS led
entire trainloads of people into the crematoria for ‘showers.’
In mid-1944, due to the transports of Jews from Hungary and
the liquidation of the Theresienstadt and Lodz ghettos,
Auschwitz-Birkenau became even more efficient and murderous.
During the next six months, Auschwitz was the final destination
for more Jews than had arrived in the preceding two years.
The approach of Soviet troops changed everything.
stopped on November 2, 1944.
Gassings
Three weeks later Himmler ordered
the destruction of the gas chambers and the crematoria at
Auschwitz-Birkenau hoping to cover up the murderous deeds that
had occurred there.
On January 18, 1945, with the Soviet army rapidly
approaching from Krakow, the SS decided to evacuate Auschwitz
taking with them 60,000 prisoners who were deemed healthy on a
forced march towards Germany.
On January 20, 1945,
51
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr Mengele’s Twins: The Story of Eva
and Miriam Mozes (Terre Haute, Indiana: CANDLES Inc., 1995), 70.
24
Obergruppenfuhrer Schmauser issued orders to kill any remaining
inmates.
200 Jewish women were shot before the SS blew up
Crematoria I and II.
On January 23, 1945, the “SS set fire to
barracks full of clothing in the ‘Canada’ section,” the very
place where some female Jewish prisoners had managed to survive
due to the comparatively good work conditions.52
On January 27,
the remaining SS officers blew up the last crematorium, which
had been kept for the disposal of bodies, and then fled.
Miraculously, more than seven thousand inmates, over four
thousand of whom were women, were alive to thank their Soviet
liberators.
52
Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews Volume III, (New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), 1049.
25
Chapter Three:
Arrival and Processing
Most women survivors, when writing about their experiences
in Auschwitz, describe the transport and arrival processes in
nearly identical terms whether they arrived on the first women’s
transport in 1942 or during the summer of death in 1944.53
With
the exception of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, who was transferred to
Auschwitz from the Stutthof concentration camp in a passenger
train that had a “wash basin, water, and a toilet,” the other
women recall feeling like trapped rats in overcrowded cattle
cars during their journey.
54
Each car contained between fifty
and one hundred individuals in a space that only would have
accommodated eight horses.
These cars were so crowded that
women recall not being able to sit or lie down even if their
journey lasted a week.
Conditions in the cattle cars on the journey to Auschwitz
were designed to be humiliating and degrading for their
occupants.
The cars had only one tiny window for ventilation
53
While the arrival and processing procedures were almost identical for both
sexes, women, as this chapter demonstrates, had different views and reactions
about what was happening to them.
54
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 9.
26
which was covered in barbed wire in order to prevent anyone from
escaping.
The SS gave the prisoners no food regardless of how
long their journey lasted.
Though on some occasions SS officers
were ‘kind’ enough to give the prisoners a bucket of water, in
exchange for some sort of bribe, one bucket was not nearly
enough for all the inhabitants of the car to have a sip.55
The
cars had no latrines so individuals were forced to use a pail,
often the same one that was used to hold fresh water, when they
had to relieve themselves.
At first, individuals were
embarrassed to be urinating and defecating in front of others.
After some time had passed, they could no longer control their
bladders and bowels and the pail overflowed with waste leaving
the car with a terrible stench.
For Isabella Leitner, the trip
was especially rough because she was menstruating, but she could
not change her pad.
Worse than the smell of the bucket overflowing with urine
and feces was the stench that arose when a person died.
Though
the trains usually stopped several times en route to their
destination, the SS seldom let their prisoners remove the bodies
of the deceased.
During one stop, when Eva Mozes Kor’s father
asked a guard if he would remove a dead body, “the guard
55
Olga Lengyel describes how the passengers in her car were forced to give up
their jewels in exchange for one bucket of fresh water. See Olga Lengyel,
Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, (Chicago: ZiffDavis Publishing Company, 1947), 18.
27
laughed” in response.56
Olga Lengyel worried that since
prisoners were in such close proximity that “the entire company
would be exposed” to diseases such as dysentery and scarlet
fever.57
Indeed, by the time they reached their destination,
there was not one author who left the train not feeling
significantly weaker than when she first started.
Sophie Weisz Miklos, when describing her journey, recalls,
I regained “consciousness” only when the train came to its final
destination. The door opened and air rushed in like a welcome visitor.
We were practically thrown off. We all looked and acted like zombies.
I heard an SS soldier yell, “raus schweinen Jüden”—Out, dirty Jews.
They poked us with their sharp rifles.58
Upon arrival, Lucille Eichengreen wondered,
“Where are we? What is this place,” I whispered. A young, gauntlooking man in blue-and-gray striped pants and a matching long shirt
and cap overheard us. The red armband on his sleeve read ‘kapo.’ His
sunken eyes looked at us incredulously. “Auschwitz! This is
Auschwitz! You mean to tell me you’ve never heard of this place.”59
Though many prisoners had been allowed to carry a suitcase
containing their valuables, upon departing the train SS officers
insisted that inmates “drop their bags” promising that they
would be returned to them later.60
Some inmates, like Livia
Bitton Jackson, though confused about how the SS would figure
out whose bags belonged to whom, believed that the Germans “must
56
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr Mengele’s Twins The Story of Eva
and Miriam Mozes (Terre Haute, IN: CANDLES, 1995), 65. Similarly, Olga
Lengyel described a guard when asked to remove a dead body responding, “Keep
your corpse. You will have many more of them soon.” See Olga Lengyel, Five
Chimneys, 19.
57
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 18.
58
Sophie Weisz Miklos, Paper Gauze Ballerina: Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor
(Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 1998), 23.
59
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San
Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1994), 89.
60
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 91.
28
have a system” for redistribution because “they were famous for
their order.”61
Inmates who hesitated to give up their
possessions were beaten with rifle butts or shot.
Little did
the new transports know that they would never see their bags
again.
Instead, their belongings were sent to Canada, a Nazi
sorting area, where other, more privileged prisoners scoured
through the new arrivals’ goods searching for gold and other
valuables that could be sent to the Reich.
Since each transport to Auschwitz contained several
thousand people, the scene that unfolded as people emerged from
the cattle cars was nothing short of chaotic.
screaming “Raus!
Raus!
Schneller!
SS men kept
Schneller!”
Isabella
Leitner feels this was because
the Germans were always in such a hurry. Death was always urgent with
them- Jewish death. The earth had to be cleansed of Jews. We didn’t
know that sharing the planet for another minute was more than this
super-race could live with. The air for them was befouled with Jewish
breath, and they must have fresh air.62
New arrivals tried in vain to stay with their families, but the
SS guards did not allow this.
“Men to the right, women to the left!” shouted a voice. Everyone moved
slowly, reluctantly. Husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, parents
and children, terrified at the thought of separation, held onto each
other desperately. But quickly and without mercy, rifle butts came
crashing down on tightly clasped fingers. There were no good-byes,
only screams and broken, bleeding hands.63
61
Livia Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the
Holocaust (New York: Simon Pulse, 1997), 72.
62
Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz, (New York:
Crowell, 1978), 30.
63
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 90.
29
None of the new arrivals was exactly sure what was going on.
As
Rena Kornreich Gelissen recalls, “the direction” that the Nazis
sent her in held “no meaning” for her.64
Olga Lengyel, though
she arrived in 1944, also had no idea of the SS’s nefarious
plan.
When it came time for the initial selection, Lengyel
wanted to spare her eldest son “from labors that might prove to
be too arduous for him.”65
Though the “Chief Selector”
questioned Lengyel, she insisted that her sons and her mother be
sent to the left because she believed “that the old and the very
young would be cared for” and only “the able-bodied adults would
have to work.”66
Unwittingly, she had sent her mother and her
sons to their deaths.
Though most new arrivals tried to stay
with their families at all costs, Yisrael Gutman believes that
the overwhelming majority of those who were “transported to
Auschwitz were unaware of their destination or its nature until
the very end.”67
Members of the SS saved other women from immediate death
for various reasons.
One SS officer, who was later identified
as Josef Mengele, the infamous chief doctor of Auschwitz, saved
Livia Bitton Jackson, age thirteen when she first entered
64
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 58.
65
Olga Lengyl, Five Chimneys, 24.
66
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys 24.
67
Yisrael Gutman, “Auschwitz- An Overview” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
Camp (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), 31.
30
Auschwitz, simply because he liked her hair.
She recalls the
exchange:
I tremble as I stand before him. He looks at me with friendly eyes.
“Goldene Haar!” he exclaims and takes one of my long braids into his
hand. I am not certain I heard right. Did he say “golden hair” about
my braids? “Bist du Jüdin?” Are you Jewish? The question startles me.
“Yes, I am Jewish.” “Wie alt bist du?” How old are you? “I am
thirteen.” “You are tall for your age. Is this your mother?” He
touches Mommy lightly on the shoulder. “You go with your mother… Go.
And remember, from now on you’re sixteen.”68
Of course, not all members of the SS were as seemingly
benevolent.
Eva and Miriam Mozes, who were only nine years old,
were dressed identically when they entered Auschwitz.
A guard
saw them standing with their mother on the train platform and
asked her, “Are they twins?”69
When she answered in the
affirmative,
without a word of explanation to my mother, he grabbed us away from my
mother and dragged us away leaving her standing there with her
bewilderment showing on her face.70
Little did the Mozes twins or their mother know then that the
guard’s ‘kindness’ in sparing them from an immediate death was
little more than an attempt to placate Dr. Mengele’s horrible
temper by supplying him with guinea pigs for his twin
experiments.
Regardless of how these women made it through the initial
inspection, whether it was by luck, trickery, or with the ‘help’
of a seemingly benevolent SS officer, the women who survived
68
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years. 73.
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 70.
70
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 71-71.
69
31
were part of a minority.
Rarely were more than twenty percent
of inmates chosen to work as laborers; more commonly, upwards of
ninety percent of each transport were sent immediately to the
gas chambers.71
Of the 400,000 inmates who were registered in
Auschwitz, less than one-third were women.
Once inmates had passed the initial selection, they were
brought inside the camp to be registered and ‘deloused’ in a
series of humiliating practices.
These procedures were
implemented because it was not enough for the Nazis to just kill
the prisoners.
Instead, as Robert Jan van Pelt believes, “they
had to be totally broken first.”72
For women, this process
usually involved a shower in front of the watchful eyes of the
SS and male Kapos, the shaving of all bodily hair, a
gynecological exam to make sure the inmates were not hiding any
valuables in their vagina or rectum, the loss of one’s clothing
and personal effects, and the tattooing of a number on each
inmate’s wrist.
It often was impossible for new arrivals,
including Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, to determine “which of the
‘initiations’ was most unpleasant.”73
71
Carol Ann Rittner and John K. Roth, Different Voices: Women and the
Holocaust, (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 12.
72
Robert Jan van Pelt, “A Site in Search of a Mission” in Anatomy of the
Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994),
130. See also Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage, 124.
73
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth: A Memoir of Survival and the
Holocaust (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 71.
32
Some ‘privileged’ prisoners, such as Eva Mozes Kor, were
not forced to partake in all the processing rituals.
Kor
insists that although “twins were given privileged treatment”
often “the privilege… was not really a privilege at all.”74
example, twins were allowed to keep their hair.
For
However, as Kor
recalls, “within two weeks our heads were filled with lice… and
had to be shaved.”75
Kor was also given the advantage of keeping
her own clothes once they had been fumigated.
Though she knew
that other inmates felt “it was another privilege to have our
own clothes,” Kor did not believe it to be such.76
Instead, she
“hated the big red cross on her beautiful burgundy dress”
because she felt it was just another way for the Germans “to
mark us so we couldn’t escape.”77
Because of her young age, Kor
was not subjected to a gynecological examination either.
Though Kor complained about her so-called privileges, other
female inmates would have been jealous of her seemingly good
fortune.
For an Orthodox Jew, such as Rena Kornreich Gelissen,
the processing procedures at Auschwitz violated not only her,
but also her religious beliefs.
Of particular offense was the
practice of shaving the heads of the new arrivals.
When
Gelissen entered Auschwitz, she thought “this must be an insane
74
Eva
Eva
76
Eva
77
Eva
75
Mozes
Mozes
Mozes
Mozes
Kor,
Kor,
Kor,
Kor,
Echoes
Echoes
Echoes
Echoes
of
of
of
of
Auschwitz,
Auschwitz,
Auschwitz,
Auschwitz,
75.
75.
75.
75-76.
33
asylum” filled with “crazy, bald people.”78
She did not realize
the true nature of the camp until she was
held by the head and pushed abruptly into a chair. The cuss of
electric shears moves closer to my ears, as a tough hand pushes my head
forward. “Don’t move!” I am spoken to roughly, handled as if my skin
was sandpaper. Running from the nape of my neck to my forehead, the
clippers cut and scrape against my skin, tearing the hair from my head.
Only married women shave their heads. Our traditions, our beliefs, are
scorned and ridiculed by the acts they commit. They shear our heads,
arms; even our pubic hair is discarded just as quickly and cruelly as
the rest of the hair on our bodies. We are shorn like sheep.79
Though only a minority of the female inmates were Orthodox, the
removal of body hair affected all women profoundly.
Nechama Tec
believes the reaction of “women to having their hair shaved
transcended national boundaries” because “all of the inmates
were deeply shamed by this procedure.”80
Isabella Leitner
recalls that after the shearing, she did not even recognize her
own sisters thinking instead that some “naked-headed monster was
standing next to me” and another “naked hair monster was
standing next to her.”81
Though Anita Lasker-Wallfisch thought
all of the initiation processes were horrific, she found “the
shaving off of my hair” to be “the most traumatic experience”
because it made her “feel totally naked, utterly vulnerable, and
reduced to a complete nobody.”82
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk concurred,
78
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 60-61. Olga Lengyel makes this
assumption too. See Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 25-26.
79
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 63,
80
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), 125.
81
Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 35.
82
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 72.
34
stating that as women “without our hair we felt totally
humiliated.”83
Though she was upset to have lost her hair, Ruth Elias
considered the tattooing to be the worst part of the
registration process.
Elias believed that once this number was
on inmates’ arms the SS would “no longer consider us to be human
beings.”84
Elias felt as if “we had been loaded into the
railroad cars like cattle and, like cattle, we were now being
branded.”85
Lucille Eichengreen also felt the tattoos
represented that inmates were “just expendable Jews.”86
women were correct in their assessment.
Both
Once the inmates were
tattooed, they were no longer unique individuals with their own
name and identity.
Instead, prisoners were forced to forfeit
their names for a number.
Though it may have not been the worst part of the
registration process, many women describe the humiliation of
being naked in front of male Kapos and SS officers for the
showers and the gynecological examination.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk
was stunned that female prisoners “were not allowed any modesty
in front of these strange men.”87
Livia Bitton Jackson was
hopeful
83
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 14.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 109.
85
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 109.
86
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 94.
87
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 14.
84
35
that by not looking at anyone… no one will see me. I hesitate before
removing my bra. My breasts are two growing buds, taut and sensitive.
I can’t have anyone see them. I decide to leave my bra on. Just then
a shot rings out. The charge is ear shattering. Several women begin
to scream. Others weep. I quickly take my bra off.88
In addition to the humiliation of having to be naked in front of
men, women prisoners were also forced to undergo gynecological
examinations, supposedly for the purpose of looking for hidden
contraband, but in reality designed to be degrading for the new
arrivals.
After all these processes had taken place, women hoped that
at least they would be given the comfort of getting back their
own clothes.
to be.
With the exception of Eva Mozes Kor, this was not
Olga Lengyel recalls, “I cannot think of any name that
would fit the bizarre rags” that the prisoners were given as
clothing.89
Lengyel feels as if
no one cared whether these rags fitted the internees. Large, buxom
women had to wear little dresses that were too short and too tight and
did not come to their knees. Slender women were given huge dresses,
some with trains. And there was no way to alter them. Buttons,
thread, and safety pins were unavailable. To best complete the style,
the Germans had an arrow of red paint, two inches wide and two feet
long, on the back of each garment. We were marked like pariahs.90
Ruth Elias complained that the clothes they received were not
appropriate for the weather.
Though it was ten degrees outside,
she received only a “flimsy dark-blue silk dress to wear.”91
Most women did not even receive shoes.
88
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys,
90
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys,
91
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope,
89
Instead, if they were
Lived a Thousand Years, 77.
29.
30.
108.
36
lucky they received “wooden clogs and no stockings” or shoes
that were worn-out and had holes in them that did not fit
properly.92
Despite the seriousness of their situation, women,
such as Lengyel, could not help but “laugh as they saw the
others so ridiculously outfitted.”93
Once all of these measures had taken place, the inmates
were finally ready to enter the camp as zugangi, or new
arrivals.
Many women survivors feel that the first few days in
Auschwitz were a test to see which prisoners were strong enough
to survive, and which others would succumb to the pressure and
give up on their desire for life.
Eva Mozes Kor strongly
believes that “the first day in camp was very crucial to those
who survived.”94
Zugangi were considered to be at the bottom of
the camp hierarchy because they “did not know how to ‘organize,’
did not know how or where to hide” and because they made
themselves look “absurd trying to defend their human dignity” by
trying to defend themselves if they were beaten.95
They did not
yet understand what was expected of them or the true measures
that were necessary for survival.
92
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 15.
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 30.
94
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 87.
95
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 13.
93
37
Chapter Four:
Daily Life
“Raus, raus!”
For women living in the Auschwitz
concentration camp, each day began at approximately four o’clock
in the morning with these shrill words forcing them out of bed.
Each day inside the camp posed new challenges for women’s
survival although their routine was nothing if not monotonous.
Ruth Kluger describes her experiences in Auschwitz in the
following terms, “I stood in rows of five and was thirsty and
was afraid of dying.
That’s it, that’s all, that’s the sum of
it.”96
The SS regulated nearly all of the prisoners waking time,
even dictating when and how long inmates could use the latrines.
In the morning, inmates would be rushed out of bed and given a
few minutes to use the toilets.
Then, they were required to
stand for hours, lined up in rows of five, for roll call.
Though many inmates were exhausted after being forced to stand
for extended periods of time, their day was just beginning.
They were given a few minutes to drink the ‘coffee’ that was
96
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York:
Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001), 100. This is also
true of male prisoners. Much of daily life in the camps was similar for men
and women because they had to contend with many of the same issues.
38
their breakfast before being assigned to that day’s work detail.
They would put in a whole day of labor, breaking only briefly
for lunch, before returning to the camp to stand in rows of five
for evening roll call.
It was only after all of this that the
women got any time to themselves, most of which was used for
sleeping before repeating this schedule the following day.
Like their male counterparts, women in Auschwitz were
forced to follow a strict Nazi-dictated regimen each day, though
their individual experiences were varied.
Some women were
privileged in the fact that they earned a coveted position
working indoors.
A few were fortunate enough not to have to
stand outside for roll call.
Still others were subjected to
extreme violence and degradation on a near-daily basis.
The
complexity of their experiences demonstrates that even within
the camp and the confines of their daily routine no two
prisoner’s lives were identical.
Roll Call
Sophie Weisz Miklos recalls, “we were inventoried,
accounted for every day.”97
In Auschwitz, inmates were forced to
line up in rows of five twice a day, regardless of the weather,
so that the Germans could account for all prisoners.
Lucille
Eichengreen remembers if anyone “fainted from the heat or
97
Sophie Weisz Miklos, Paper Gauze Ballerina: Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor,
(Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 1998), 24.
39
dropped from exhaustion,” they were “taken away never to be seen
again.”98
Individuals “who did not come out of the barracks” for
roll call “were immediately sent to the gas chambers.”99
Kor
recalls there were “no excuses” for not partaking in this
morning ritual.100
During Appell, prisoners were required to
“stand erect for whatever number of minutes or hours the roll
call lasted… because it was one of the sacred rituals.”101
Women, regardless of their age or health, were forced to wait in
the scorching sun or freezing cold for several hours before the
SS came to count them, though the actual count was usually
accomplished in a matter of minutes.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
felt Appell was meant to be a form of torture because prisoners
were “strictly forbidden to move” even though this often meant
standing in line with “shit running down” their legs.102
Latrines
Time spent in and access to the latrines was rigidly
controlled by Kapos and members of the SS. Olga Lengyel recalls
only being permitted to “go to the latrines twice each day.”103
Livia Bitton Jackson insists that inmates were only allowed to
98
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San
Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 99.
99
Sophie Weisz Miklos, Paper Gauze Ballerina, 24.
100
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr Mengele’s Twins: The Story of Eva
and Miriam Mozes, (Terre Heute, Indiana: CANDLES Inc., 1995), 91.
101
Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York:
Crowell, 1978), 51.
102
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth: A Memoir of Survival and the
Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 73.
103
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz
(Chicago: Ziff Davis Publishing Company, 1947), 36.
40
use the toilet during the day “under guard in groups of
fifty.”104
She also remembers, “luckily, the German guards could
not bear the stench and” stood at a distance while inmates used
the lavatory.105
Often, SS guards took hours to show up to
escort the women to the toilets so the women learned “how to
wait, and control nature.”106
possible.
Sometimes though, this was not
Rena Kornreich Gelissen remembers the only severe
beating she got in Auschwitz was over access to the latrines.
She and her sister Danka, who had arrived at Auschwitz the day
before, were at roll call when Danka whispered,
“Rena, I have to go to the bathroom.” “That’s not allowed. You should
have gone before roll call.” “I can’t help it.” “You have to wait
until roll call is over.” Reality is cruel. She holds her legs
together. I take Danka’s hand, leading her back to our block where
Elza is standing on the steps. “Elza, will you please let my sister
inside? She has to go to the bathroom, she has diarrhea.” “I can’t do
that. You know nobody goes into the block after roll call. There are
rules!”107
Gelissen, wanting to help her sister, began shaking Elza to
distract her while Danka ran to the bathroom.
beaten in return.
She was badly
From that day forward, Danka learned to use
the latrines only when the inmates were given access.
When the Kapo yelled for the first time after inmates
entered the camp, “line up for the latrines,” women, including
104
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the
Holocaust, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 95.
105
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 95.
106
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 135.
107
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
(Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 75-76.
41
Lucille Eichengreen, were shocked to find “no toilets.”108
Instead, they found “holes in the ground, and no paper.”109
Robert Jan van Pelt in his article “A Site in Search of a
Mission” describes the prisoners’ morning ritual:
Imagine 7000 inmates at sunrise suffering from diarrhea or dysentery,
trying to enter, find an unoccupied place, defecate, manage not to fall
into the sewer and get out in the 10 or so minutes allowed by the camps
regulations to such necessities. Assuming that 150 inmates could find
a place at one time, and also assuming that all 7000 inmates were able
to move their bowels in the morning, it would require 46 successive
“seatings,” with all the traffic jams involved.110
Besides having a terrible stench, the latrines lacked seats and
there were no shame walls, which meant women had no privacy
while they were using the toilets.
Ruth Kluger felt
particularly sorry for older women in the camps because they
were forced to defecate next to one another even though they
continued to hold the pre-war “rigid standards of modesty.”111
Though the Geneva Convention (1929) had mandated that
prisoners “were to be lodged in barracks affording all possible
guarantees of hygiene and healthfulness,” the SS ignored this
mandate even though they attempted to give the pretense of
adherence.112
The SS also ignored another protocol issued during
the Geneva Convention that stated belligerents were to furnish
108
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 97.
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 97. Ruth Elias also complains
about the lack of toilet paper. See Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 121.
110
Robert Jan van Pelt, “A Site in Search of a Mission” in Anatomy of the
Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994),
131-133.
111
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 103.
112
Robert Jan van Pelt, “A Site in Search of a Mission,” 127.
109
42
prisoners with a “sufficient quantity of water for the care of
there own bodily cleanliness.”113
Since there were not enough
toilets for all of the women in the camp, individuals who were
sick were “incapable of holding back” their bowels movements
which led to “uncleanliness around the latrines” which were
rarely cleaned.114
At times, women were reduced to performing
their bodily functions in the same bowls they used for eating
and drinking.
Women had no access to sinks or showers and had
few other methods of cleaning themselves.
This was especially
problematic when women were menstruating because they had no way
to clean off the blood that ran down their legs.
Labor
Though Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, claimed that
work helped inmates “get over the emptiness of imprisonment,”
few women agreed with this assessment regardless of whether they
were physical laborers or a skilled worker.115
In Auschwitz,
there were many different measures as to what constituted a
privileged position.
Most often, the main criteria was that the
job was inside away from the harsh weather.
Sometimes, the
women were lucky and their positions let them escape from having
to partake in roll calls or selections, which gave them time to
recoup some of their strength.
In other instances, women
113
Robert Jan van Pelt, “A Site in Search of a Mission,” 128.
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 57.
115
Rudolf Hoess, Commandant at Auschwitz (London: Phoenix Press, 1959), 75.
114
43
received an extra helping of food or some other privilege.
Their job or occupation before the war was rarely a factor for
the SS when deciding what type of labor detail to assign the
women.
Very infrequently did the SS allow inmates to do the
type of work to which they were accustomed or trained.
Rather,
Lengyel feels the SS got a sick pleasure from placing “the
illiterates in the office jobs and reserving the backbreaking
work for the intellectuals.”116
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch believes that she was saved from
death because she made known that she was a cellist who had
studied under some prominent musicians in Berlin.
When the SS
heard this, they had her audition for a seat on the camp
orchestra, which she easily passed.
Lasker-Wallfisch realizes
that her “experiences were of course different from those of the
vast majority of prisoners for the simple reason that” she “was
lucky enough to be in the orchestra.”117
She felt that as a
member of the orchestra, she “had not lost her identity totally…
and melted away into the grey mass of indistinguishable,
nameless people” which in turn allowed her “to maintain a shred
of human dignity.”118
Instead, she was recognized throughout
Auschwitz as ‘the cellist’ for she was the only one who played
that instrument.
One of the most enviable privileges of her
116
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 38.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 75.
118
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 76.
117
44
position was that members of the orchestra were not required to
line up outside in the winter for roll call.
Instead, they,
while still required to line up in rows of five, were lucky
enough to be counted inside their barrack.
Lasker-Wallfisch
also received an extra ration of food, which she shared with her
sister Renate.
Eva Mozes Kor’s assignment in Auschwitz was to be a guinea
pig in Dr. Mengele’s pseudomedical twin experiments.
She and
her sister Miriam were considered privileged prisoners because
they were allowed to keep their hair and clothing, did not have
to perform any hard physical labor, and even had a three-hole
latrine in their barrack.
Kor, after first hearing about the gas chambers was puzzled
as to why she and her sister were left alive while the rest of
her family had perished.
are children.
She thought, “this is ridiculous.
We cannot work but we are alive.”
119
We
When Kor
questioned some of the other children as to why twins were so
privileged, a girl replied that Mengele used them in
experiments.
about?”120
Kor wondered, “what experiments are you talking
The next morning she and Miriam were to find out.
Though her first impression of Mengele was that he was handsome,
she soon found out what a monster he truly was.
119
120
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 85.
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 85.
45
Three times a
week, Kor and the other twins were “marched to Auschwitz I
where” they “were forced to sit naked… for six to eight
hours.”121
During this time, they were “photographed, painted,
measured and marked, and our records were compared” leaving Kor
to feel that she “was merely a piece of meat.”122
Also during
these excursions, the twins were subjected to injections and
blood tests, many with long-lasting effects.
Because Mengele
had so many specimens at his disposal, he was not overly
concerned with the health of his twins.
If a twin died during
one of his experiments, “then the other twin was killed” so a
comparison could be made during the autopsy of the two bodies.123
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s position was also considered
privileged, yet it had none of the downfalls of Kor’s.
Because
of the Communist connections she had among the other women
prisoners, Nomberg-Przytyk was able to land a coveted position
working as a clerk in the camp infirmary.
register prisoners entering the infirmary.
Her job was simply to
In this position,
Nomberg-Przytyk was no longer be subjected to selections, no
longer had to endure the daily roll call, and did not have to
perform heavy, physical labor.
Olga Lengyel also secured a place for herself working in
the camp infirmary.
Unlike Nomberg-Przytyk, who had no prior
121
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, (no page # given)
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, (no page # given)
123
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 107.
122
46
medical experience, Lengyel, before she was deported, had worked
as a surgical assistant in her husband’s hospital.
She obtained
her job as a doctor because the SS issued an order that “all
internees with any knowledge of medical practice should make
themselves known.”124
She, along with four other women, were
responsible for taking care of the 30,000 to 40,000 individuals
interned in the camp and saw as many as 1500 people each day.
Though Lengyel was disheartened that she could not do more for
her patients, because of the lack of proper medical supplies,
she took comfort in the fact that at least she was helping
others to the best of her ability.
For Lengyel, the best perk
of her job was that she “had the luxury of a good wash” each day
because there was a basin and soap in the infirmary.125
For the women who were not lucky enough to be working in
such privileged positions, Pelagia Lewinska feels it was
“difficult to say which was more exhausting the physical effort
or the terrible sterility of long hours where the mind grasps
nothing but the boring labor.”126
Some prisoners reportedly felt
“hard work was preferable to easier forms of monotony because
time that is passed unperceived wearies us less even if our
limbs end up aching,” but Ruth Elias would have disagreed with
124
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 69.
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 71.
126
Pelagia Lewinska, “Twenty Months in Auschwitz,” in Different Voices: Women
and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 98.
125
47
them.127
Elias was assigned to a work detail that “moved heavy
rocks from one spot to another.”128
The following day they “had
to carry the same rocks back to their original location.”129
Elias soon realized that “it was totally senseless work”
designed to kill the inmates “not only physically but also
spiritually.”130
Determined to survive, she and the other women
in her work detail “marshaled all our strength and continued to
drag the rocks back and forth.”131
Rena Kornreich Gelissen also was forced to perform mindless
physical labor the majority of the time she was imprisoned at
Auschwitz.
Initially, she and her sister Danka were forced to
“sift sand through… nets and load it onto lorries.”132
Once the
truck was full, the women were required to push it up a hill,
where the sand was unloaded in a separate pile.
After they had
unloaded the truck, they were forced to “push the lorries back
down the hill… and start all over again.”133
Still believing
Auschwitz was a labor camp, Gelissen thought the work she
performed was ridiculous, yet she felt she “was helping the
127
Pelagia Lewinska, “Twenty Months,” 98.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel
(New York: John Wiley, 1998), 113.
129
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 113.
130
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 113.
131
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 113.
132
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 76.
133
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 77.
128
48
Germans build something” which allowed her to hope that she
would achieve freedom sooner.134
Gelissen realized during her next assignment that Auschwitz
was not truly a labor camp.
She and the other members of her
work detail were forced to carry ten bricks at a time across a
field.
For the next few days, the women were required to stand
in line and toss bricks to each other until the entire pile was
back in its original location.
This demoralizing experience was
one that was typical of Auschwitz.
Food
As we know from better-known survivor testimonies like
those of Elie Wiesel, throughout their time at Auschwitz,
regardless of sex, inmate’s lives revolved around food.
The
food distributed by the SS was poor in quality and inadequate in
quantity.
Elias recalls that the food was so disgusting that
inmates ate their allocation “with a combination of aversion and
ravenous hunger.”135
When prisoners first arrived at Auschwitz,
they were not given a bowl or any utensils though soup was a
daily staple of their diet.
While some women made due “slurping
soup out of their dirty… palms,” others found more ingenious
methods of eating so as not to waste any precious drops.136
Lucille Eichengreen recalled using a friend’s wooden shoes as a
134
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 77.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 144.
136
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 98.
135
49
bowl.
Though she felt “slightly revolted by our degradation,”
hunger “blanked out the images of pigs eating out of dirty
wooden troughs.”137
Olga Lengyel remembers an even more degrading experience.
In her barrack, the blocowa “commandeered the boiler as a
chamber pot” and her cronies insisted that bowls be used for the
same purpose due to the lack of adequate access to the
latrines.138
Lengyel recalls in the morning,
we had to be content rinsing the bowls as well as we could before we
put in our minute rations. The first days our stomachs rose up at the
thought of using what were actually chamber pots at night. But hunger
drives, and we were so starved that we were ready to eat any food.
That it had to be handled in such bowls could not be helped.139
Tec states that by the decision to not issue inmates any
utensils, “prisoners would have to lap up the soup, doglike,
(which was) a degrading experience in itself.”140
The food distributed by the Nazis was often not really food
at all.
When Livia Bitton Jackson first arrived in Auschwitz
with her mother, her aunt Celia, who had been imprisoned for
several months, insisted that the women eat her ration of bread.
While her mother refused to eat it because it looked like a
“cake of mud,” Jackson forced it down though the lump turned
137
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 98.
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 35.
139
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 36.
140
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993), 140.
138
50
into “wet sand particles.”141
Eva Mozes Kor’s first impression
of the bread was that it “tasted very much like sawdust.”142
Though Kor and her sister Miriam, having grown up in an
extremely religious household refused to eat anything their
first day in the camp because “it was not Kosher,” they
ultimately were forced to “violate God’s law” and eat whatever
food they were given in order to ensure their survival.143
The soup that was distributed each day contained few
vegetables but often had “pieces of glass… and wood… and cloth”
as well as “buttons and all other kinds of junk.”
144
Lengyel
felt that “under normal conditions, it would have been
absolutely inedible” but she and others such as Leitner realized
they had to be prepared to “eat shit” if necessary in order to
survive.
145
Women soon learned to “remove the undesirable items
and eat the rest.”146
Though the food was disgusting, eating one’s rations meant
the difference between life and death.
Ruth Elias continued to
drink the “ersatz coffee,” which she called dishwater, “because
it warmed our freezing bodies a little.”147
141
Elias also resorted
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 89.
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 81.
143
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 82.
144
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 89. Eva Mozes Kor,
Echoes from Auschwitz, 93.
145
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 37. Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella,
36.
146
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 93-94.
147
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 113.
142
51
to sucking “green weeds poking out of the soil” for hours at a
time imagining “the little leaves were driving away (her)
hunger.”148
Elias recalls that in an effort to stave away their
constant hunger, inmates
talked about food constantly. Every day after work we ate the meager
supper that had been provided, devouring our entire daily bread ration.
Then a few young women would get together on the third tier and start
“cooking”—that is, we talked about all the various foods and dishes we
had known back home. These conversations were like self-inflicted
torment, but they gave us a feeling of having eaten our fill. We
cooked in our imaginations for hours at a time, even though most of us
were too young to have much experience actually cooking. This cooking
also affirmed the ties to our families and strengthened our will to
survive, to hold out so that we could see our families again.149
While prisoners were starving, Nazi guards had plenty of
food for themselves and their families.
Ruth Kluger recalls one
incident where
a German guard on the other side of the barbed wire preens with a
walking stick that has a loaf of bread on the end. The idea is to show
the starving prisoners that one has the power to let bread spoil in the
dirt. … the loaf of bread at the end of the stick hit me like a blow
in the diaphragm, because it was such a crudely sarcastic expression of
undifferentiated hatred.150
To add insult to injury, Rudolph Hoess had a vegetable garden
that backed the crematoria.
Other SS officials had their fill
of gourmet food seized from the luggage of new arrivals and from
Red Cross packages that were meant to be distributed to the
inmates.
148
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 122-123.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 122.
150
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 101-102.
149
52
Though constantly hungry, many women recall how they could
not sate an unbearable thirst for water.
Livia Bitton Jackson
recalls that “getting used to the thirst is the hardest” aspect
of living in Auschwitz.151
Ruth Kluger agrees and states that
“hunger was less of a problem than thirst.”152
Kluger realizes
… how long it takes a person to die of hunger and how quickly he dies
from thirst. You can live for weeks, or even months, without food, but
you die of thirst within days. Accordingly, thirst is more nagging,
harder to put up with than hunger. In Birkenau, our food, our daily
nondescript soup, must have been very salty, for I was always thirsty.153
Indeed, water was not distributed in Auschwitz.
According to
Jackson, the only liquids inmates received were “black coffee in
the morning and soup in the evening.”154
Lengyel insists that
coffee was a presumptuous word for this “insipid, brownish
liquid” that inmates were forced to drink as their morning
meal.155
If prisoners really wanted water, they had to drink
from the “lake, a large hollow in the ground filled with murky
water.”156
Though Jackson was horrified by this “filthy, smelly
swamp,” she drank thirstily because water “quenches and
revives.”157
Jackson kept drinking until her cousins warned her
that “some girls got very sick” because “they drank too much.”158
Rain was a godsend because it gave the inmates an opportunity to
151
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 100.
153
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 100.
154
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived
155
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 37.
156
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived
157
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived
158
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived
a Thousand Years, 95.
152
a Thousand Years, 86.
a Thousand Years, 86.
a Thousand Years, 86-87.
a Thousand Years, 87.
53
quench their thirst and wet their dry throats.
Some women
became so desperate for water that they were willing to trade
their daily ration of bread for a few drops.
Organizing
Organizing was a way to get commodities in the camp that
were not readily available including but not limited to bowls,
clothing, shoes, utensils, and food.
Lasker-Wallfisch believes
that organizing was the “camp parlance for bartering” and felt
with “connections and bread, you could obtain anything.”159
Kor
described organizing in somewhat different terms and stated that
it was “taking anything that would enable you to survive.”160
Lengyel, though she felt “to ‘organize’ meant to steal,” was
surprised that so many “women, who formerly would not have taken
a hairpin, became utterly hardened thieves and never suffered
the slightest feeling of remorse.”161
However the women chose to
define organization, most agree that it was necessary for
survival.
While at Auschwitz, Kor organized a pot that had been left
unattended and food.
Though she was caught once taking
potatoes, she only received a reprimand, “child, it is not nice
to steal.
Put them back.”162
This however did not discourage
her from stealing food again in the future.
159
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 81-82.
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 100.
161
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 56, 109.
162
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 120.
160
54
Kor believed theft
was necessary for keeping her and her sister alive and was
“prepared to do whatever” she “had to do to live.”163
inmates organized food or other necessities.
attempted to get luxury items.
Not all
Sometimes, they
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch recalled
“organizing cigarettes by paying for them” with her extra
rations of bread.164
Of course, the consequences if the SS
caught prisoners with contraband materials were harsh.
Prisoners found with illegal goods were forced to “kneel down
and eat whatever they were caught with” including packs of
cigarettes.165
Not all organization efforts were condoned though.
Nomberg-Przytyk recalls one blokowa named Cyla who was in charge
of the death block whom she felt took organization too far.
Inmates assigned to the death block “were not to receive any
food, thereby conserving the gas it would take to eradicate
them.”166
Since these prisoners were still on the camp register,
Cyla received large rations of food that were meant for these
condemned inmates.
Cyla exchanged these rations “for cigarettes
and would then exchange the cigarettes for luxuries that were
brought into the camp by prisoners who worked outside the
camp.”167
She often shared these goods with other inmates, such
163
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 122.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 75.
165
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 76.
166
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 57.
167
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 57.
164
55
as the infirmary staff.
Though she gave Nomberg-Przytyk
presents such as chocolate and a dress, Nomberg-Przytyk believed
that Cyla “was a monster” for taking advantage of the
situation.168
Violence and Death
Sophie Weisz Miklos believed that the SS “took an extreme
sadistic pleasure in the slow and torturous deaths they
inflicted on us.”169
Indeed, all of the women examined mention
the extreme brutality of the SS, Kapos, and even fellow
prisoners regardless of whether they had experienced such
cruelty personally.
Violence and the fear of death seemed to
dominate the daily lives of women living in Auschwitz.
In Auschwitz, “death was an every day part of living.”170
Elias recalls that the “constant odor of burnt flesh” from the
crematoria surrounded the camp.171
Women saw “dead bodies…
everywhere” and were constantly reminded by the SS that they
“were going to be dead before long” because the Germans were
“going to kill all” Jews.172
Nomberg-Przytyk believes that once
she had lived in Auschwitz for a few months “she could look at
the dead with indifference.”173
Instead of going around corpses
168
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 57.
Sophie Weisz Miklos, Paper Gauze Ballerina, 24.
170
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 108.
171
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 115.
172
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 108.
173
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 115.
169
56
in her path, she “stepped over it, as if” she “was merely
stepping over a piece of wood.”174
Some women came closer to death than others.
Livia Bitton
Jackson recalls having several violent and near-death
experiences, all while trying to protect her ailing mother.
The
first time resulted from her asking her block elder for a favor.
I apologize to Elsa, and explain that my request is extremely urgent.
Elsa glares at me, “Go back to your place immediately.” “Please
understand. The bed is broken above my mother and she is too weak to
move away. Please, tell the women to get off the cracked plank before
it breaks completely and falls on my mother. Please. They will listen
to you…” My voice chokes with anxiety. Elsa looks at me
incredulously. “You. You dare come here and interrupt? Get out of
here you stupid little dog!” Her outrage is underlined by a fierce
blow to my right cheekbone. My head reels from the impact of the
slap.175
Another time, while visiting her mother in the infirmary,
Jackson was caught by an SS guard.
Though she was certain she
was going to be executed for walking around the camp unescorted,
the guard demonstrated some kindness and allowed her to escape
with a ‘light’ punishment.
She was “ordered to kneel on the
gravel in front of the command barrack for twenty-four hours
without food or drink” where passerby could see her and witness
her humiliation.176
On another occasion, Jackson’s mother was
beaten for taking too long to get dressed.
Jackson, hoping to
help her mother, jumped
at the tall, husky woman and shove her against the wall. “Leave my
mother alone. Don’t you see you are going to break her arm?” The
174
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 115.
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 125.
176
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 130.
175
57
towering buxom figure in the dreaded SS uniform swings around. Her
fist on my cheek sends me reeling. A second punch knocks me to the
slippery floor. Now she is on top of me. She is kicking me in the
face, in the chest, in the abdomen. She is kicking my head. The black
boots gleam and my blood splashes thinly on the wet floor. A kick in
the back sends me rolling across the floor toward the exit.177
Though Jackson was seriously injured, she remained grateful to
the SS officer reasoning that she “could have shot me.
But she
did not.”178
Olga Lengyel also experienced violence early and often
during her imprisonment in Auschwitz.
While she was being
‘deloused,’ a SS officer singled her out and ordered the barber
not to “clip that one’s hair.”179
Lengyel, fearful of what the
officer would expect for granting her this privilege, decided to
“disregard the order, and got in line to be shorn.”180
When the
officer reappeared and saw her bare skull, he grew angry and
slapped her face “as hard as he could” then ordered a guard to
give her “a few lashes with his whip.”181
As terrifying as this incidents was, nothing prepared
Lengyel for the cool cruelty of Irma Griese.
When Lengyel first
encountered Griese, she “felt sure that a woman of such beauty
could not be cruel… for she was truly a blue-eyed, fair-haired
177
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 145.
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 145. As both Jackson
and Lengyel demonstrate, female guards and Kapos were often more violent and
vicious than their male counterparts towards the interned women.
179
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 28.
180
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 29.
181
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 29.
178
58
‘angel.’”182
This assumption held until one day when Griese
decided that Lengyel had made her look foolish in front of other
prisoners.
Lengyel’s only offense was obeying Dr Klein, an SS
doctor and her immediate supervisor, who told her to ignore the
orders issued by Griese.
Though Griese did nothing to Lengyel
at the time, she later summoned Lengyel to her office.
Griese
put the “cold barrel of her revolver” on Lengyel’s left temple
and proceeded to crack “the butt of her gun on” Lengyel’s “head,
once, twice, again and again.”183
Then she hit Lengyel in the
face with her fist multiple times drawing blood.
The incident
made Lengyel question “how could such animal fury dwell in so
beautiful a body?”184
Other Activities
Ruth Elias believes “the Nazis wanted to kill our minds
even before they killed us physically.”185
Prisoners were
completely cut off from the outside world and had no access to
newspapers, books, or radio.
Women worked to counteract this in
several ways.
One of the key methods they employed was simply talking
with other women.
Though they could not associate with each
other while working, for fear of being beaten, they got together
at night in the barracks.
182
Olga
Olga
184
Olga
185
Ruth
183
Lengyel, Five Chimneys,
Lengyel, Five Chimneys,
Lengyel, Five Chimneys,
Elias, Triumph of Hope,
They talked about food, shared
50.
108.
203.
122.
59
recipes, told stories, sang songs, recited poetry, quoted
scripture from the Torah and Talmud, and recalled their life
before the war.
They also discussed what they were going to do
once Auschwitz was liberated.
In this way, women kept from
succumbing to the Nazi plan to make them into the living-dead.
By recalling memories of happier times, women remembered that
they had something to live for which encouraged them to fight
even harder for their survival.
This “mental and spiritual
nourishment” also allowed the women to put their “brain-cells to
work to keep them from atrophying.”186
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, when she first arrived at Auschwitz,
could not understand how the women she worked with could “joke,
dance, and tell stories” when “the sky above was red with the
flames of the crematorium.”187
After being imprisoned in
Auschwitz for several months, she too recited poems and told
jokes.
On December 31, 1944, the women who worked with Nomberg-
Przytyk in the infirmary even threw a New Year’s Eve party
complete with wine and presents.
Though such blatant illegal
activities were rare, her case demonstrates that life could go
on with some degree of normalcy, even under the omnipresent
shadow of violence and death.
186
187
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 123.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 114.
60
Chapter Five:
Maternity and Fertility
The themes of maternity and fertility have special
importance in Holocaust memoirs written by women.
Though these
topics comprise only one component of women’s experiences in
Auschwitz, they suggest a form of suffering specific to the
female sex.
Because women, particularly mothers, were
especially threatened by Nazi policy and because the future for
European Jews seemed unlikely to many inmates, narratives tend
to place a high value on themes surrounding motherhood.
Though
both men and women “were subjected to similar kinds of tormentfilth, starvation, forced labor, and death,” only female inmates
were forced to cope with “pregnancy, amenorrhea, abortion” or
infanticide.188
Amenorrhea is especially important because it affected
nearly all women in Auschwitz above the age of puberty and
threatened them with infertility.
Though some writers
attributed “the lapse of menstruation to poor food or trauma,
others to a drug put in the soup,” the theme “is nearly always
188
Carol Ann Rittner and John K Roth, Different Voices: Women and the
Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 38.
61
mentioned in the memoirs of women.”189
According to Marlene
Heinemann, the cessation of menstruation “must be considered a
form of psychological assault on a woman’s identity, since most
women had no idea if fertility would return if they survived.”190
Heinemann believes amenorrhea threatened women “with the loss of
the specific biological function which society” at the time
insisted was the chief vocation for women.191
Thus, the
possibility of infertility was seen as a threat to having a
worthwhile life after Liberation.
Yet, if menstruation
continued while women were in the camps, it “became an
additional reason for beatings” from Kapos and the SS.192
Tec states that as long as women “continued to get their
monthly periods, the experience would be enveloped in a series
of humiliations.”193
The lack of washing facilities contributed
to the inmate’s feelings of degradation since they could not
adequately rinse the blood off themselves.
Usually women
stopped menstruating within a short period after arriving in
Auschwitz.
Though many women thought bromide was mixed into
their food to prevent menstruation, there is no evidence that
189
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust,
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 19.
190
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 19. See also Ellen S. Fine
“Women Writers and the Holocaust: Strategies for Survival” in Reflections of
the Holocaust in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press,
1990), 82. See also Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage, 168-169.
191
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 19.
192
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 20. Ellen S. Fine agrees with
this assessment. See “Women Writers and the Holocaust,” 82.
193
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), 168.
62
proves this to be an accurate assumption.
Rather, historians,
such as Tec, generally agree that “poor nourishment and the
rundown state of women’s bodies were responsible for the
change.”194
Yet some female survivors to this day continue to believe
the rumors.
Though only eight when she entered Auschwitz, Eva
Mozes Kor recalled hearing that the food distributed by the
Nazis “contained some type of bromide” that caused menstruation
to cease.195
Olga Lengyel also attributed amenorrhea “to the
mysterious chemical powder with which the Germans dosed our
food.”196
Lengyel claimed “the Lagerälteste, the blocovas, and
the Stubendiensts, as well as the kitchen employees, none of
whom ate the ordinary camp food, were, in most cases, free from
menstrual problems.”197
Lengyel, however, was never able to see
or get any of this powder because the “SS woman mixes it into
the food herself” and “nobody else is allowed to go near it.”198
Other women, such as Ruth Kluger, realized that in
Auschwitz “everyone was so undernourished that no one
menstruated.”199
Kluger did not believe the rumors that the
194
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage, 168.
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr Mengele’s Twins: The Story of Eva
and Miriam Mozes (Terre Heute, Indiana: CANDLES Inc, 1995), 94.
196
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz,
(Chicago: Ziff Davis Publishing Company, 1947), 98.
197
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 98-99.
198
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 99.
199
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York:
Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001), 119.
195
63
Nazis had put a powder in the inmate’s food.
Instead, she felt
this rumor “only goes to show how well-off” the other women “had
been before since they didn’t know the effects of starvation.”200
Some women, like Lucille Eichengreen, who had been interned in
the ghettos for several years, stopped menstruating before they
entered Auschwitz.
Eichengreen, like Kluger, attributed this to
“poor nutrition.”201
As a young teenager, Livia Bitton Jackson was grateful that
her last menstrual period occurred before she entered Auschwitz.
Soon after her arrival, Jackson, while standing at roll call,
saw another girl with “a thick red stream of blood on the inner
thigh of each leg.”202
Initially, Jackson thought the girl had
been shot before realizing that she was menstruating.
Because
inmates had “no underwear, (and) no sanitary napkins,” the blood
simply flowed down their legs.203
Jackson felt embarrassed for
the girl and insisted that she “would rather die than have blood
flow down my legs!
it.”204
In full view.
Oh my God!
I could not bear
Jackson then realized that her next cycle was set to
begin in less than three weeks.
She comforted herself by
200
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 119.
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories
Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 66.
202
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years:
Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 95.
203
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years,
204
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years,
201
64
of the Holocaust (San
Growing Up in the
95.
95.
saying, “there’ll not be a next time.
By then the war will be
over.”205
Rena Kornreich Gelissen menstruated longer than most women
since she came directly from her home, where she was well-fed,
to Auschwitz.
When her cycle began while she was interned in
Auschwitz I, she had no access to rags or sanitary napkins so
she was forced to take a few squares of newsprint, wipe them
against her trousers to make sure that they were clean, then
“crumple them up and place the newspaper between” her legs.206
A
few months later when she was transferred to Birkenau, Gelissen
found that there was no newspaper for her to use.
She “didn’t
think the latrine in Birkenau would be any different than the
one in Auschwitz” so she did not bring any extra newsprint with
her.207
She did not anticipate newspaper “being a luxury that”
women “no longer deserve.”208
Gelissen became apprehensive about
menstruating.
Once a month my period arrives without any prior warning. It is
something I dread and wait for, never knowing when it will make its
appearance. Will I be working? Will I be in the shaving line on a
Sunday, embarrassed in front of the men? Will today be the day that I
cannot stop the flow and the SS decide to beat me to death for being
unclean? Will today be the day that the scrap that I find gives me an
infection?209
205
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 95.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
(Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 81.
207
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 104.
208
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 104.
209
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 104-105.
206
65
What bothered Gelissen most was that she could not wash.
She
recalled that no matter “how hard, nor how often I scrub, it
always feels that something is left on my flesh.”210
She feared
that “the smell of blood” on her legs “will attract the dogs to
me” and they would maim and even possibly kill her as they did
many other women.211
Though Gelissen worried about being beaten for
menstruating, she and others knew that for women, the “greatest
crime in Auschwitz was to be pregnant” or to arrive with young
children.212
Katharina von Kellenbach believes the “Nazi
Holocaust against the Jews was the most intentional and
systematic in its war against a Jewish mother’s capacity to
reproduce the Jewish ‘race’.”213
Jewish women “were not killed
simply as Jews, (but as) women who could carry and give birth to
the next generation of Jews.”214
As the Nazis “tightened their
control over Jewish life, Jewish women lost control” of their
fertility and “were in no position to prevent, accept, or
terminate a pregnancy.”215
In Auschwitz especially, the struggle
210
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 105.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 105.
212
Ellen S. Fine, “Women Writers and the Holocaust,” 83. See also Gisella
Perl, “Gisella Perl” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York:
Paragon House, 1993), 104.
213
Katharina von Kellenbach, “Reproduction and Resistance During the
Holocaust” in Women in the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation (Lanham,
Maryland: University Press of America, 1999), 19.
214
Magda Trocme, “Magda Trocme” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust
(New York: Paragon House, 1993), 392. See also Katharina von Kellenbach,
“Reproduction and Resistance,” 20.
215
Katharina von Kellenbach, “Reproduction and Resistance,” 28.
211
66
for one’s own physical survival was “all encompassing, drowning
out ethical and religious… decision making.”216
For women deported to Auschwitz who were pregnant or “with
children under fifteen, gender was destiny”217 and “pregnant
women… were doomed from the beginning.”218
Nazi policy in the
camps focused attention on women’s biological roles and
throughout the twenty-eight months of selections at Auschwitz
women who were pregnant or had small children were immediately
sent to the gas chamber without the reprieve of working.
Sara
Nomberg-Przytyk believes that “here in Auschwitz the German
thugs murdered women and children first.”219
As von Kellenbach
points out, “mothers were singled out for killing by the Nazis,
and they died in disproportionately higher numbers.”220
Nechama Tec believes that “because mothers were identified
more strongly with young children than fathers, their fate was
more closely tied to their children’s.”221
Jewish children were
not economically valuable to the Nazis and were seen as
undesirable because they were symbolic of a Jewish future which
was perceived as a threat to the Aryan race.
As a rule, all
children entering Auschwitz with the exception of the children
216
Katharina von Kellenbach, “Reproduction and Resistance,” 28.
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 14.
218
Irena Strzelecka “Women,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), 405.
219
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 80.
220
Katharina von Kellenbach, “Reproduction and Resistance During the
Holocaust,” 21.
221
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage, 161.
217
67
who were chosen as participants in Dr Mengele’s experiments were
to be immediately sent to the gas chambers.
A few mothers,
realizing what was happening and feeling a strong sense of selfpreservation, tried to give their children to older women they
knew were going to be gassed.
Yet, the majority of mothers
refused to part with their offspring even if they knew what was
coming.
Even Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, reportedly
observed how “families in Auschwitz wanted to stay together at
all costs.”222
Laurence Rees believes,
even though the Nazis lost valuable labor by sending some young,
healthy women to the gas chambers with their offspring, they realized
that to wretch boys and girls from their mothers against their will at
the initial selection would result in such horrendous scenes that
efficient management of the killing process would be almost
impossible.223
The Nazis soon realized “it was almost always counter to their
own interests to separate mothers forcibly from their
children.”224
Some pregnant women were able to conceal their condition
when they entered the camp and gave birth while imprisoned.
It
was very difficult for the SS to catch all women who were
pregnant during their arrival because, as Lengyel recalls,
“women usually wore several layers of clothing, one on top of
222
Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History, (New York: Public Affairs, 2005),
125.
223
Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, 125.
224
Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, 125.
68
the other, which they hoped to keep” which concealed all but the
most obvious pregnancies.225
Women whose pregnancy was discovered by the SS after
entering Auschwitz were put to death.
If by chance a woman
carried a pregnancy to term and gave birth, and the infant was
discovered, both mother and child were sent to the gas chambers.
Since childbirth was difficult, and often punishable by death,
the event, which was cause for celebration in the outside world,
was an unhappy occasion in Auschwitz.
Only women who aborted or
killed their infants could escape the punishment for illegal
births.
Yet some mothers, like Esther in Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s
Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, “refused to have an
abortion” or kill their newborn because they were “convinced
that they would find a way to keep their babies.”226
Nomberg-Przytyk, as a clerk in the camp infirmary, knew
firsthand that pregnancy was a death sentence for both mother
and child.
When her friend Esther, who was pregnant approached
Nomberg-Przytyk and said, while asking to stay in the hospital,
“I want to give birth to this baby,” Nomberg-Przytyk did not
know how to respond.227
Nomberg-Przytyk tried to tell Esther
what happened to women who had babies in the camp infirmary, but
Esther refused to believe her and insisted on checking into the
225
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 115.
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage, 164.
227
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 68.
226
69
hospital announcing, “I am sure that when Mengele sees it he
will let me raise it in the camp.”228
Esther proceeded to give
birth to a healthy baby boy and rejected saving her own life by
refusing to not feed him so that he would die.
At the next
selection, when Esther proudly showed her baby off to Dr.
Mengele, she was immediately marked for the gas chambers.
Olga Lengyel, who was a doctor in the camp infirmary,
insists that the Germans “sent all pregnant women to the gas
chambers.”229
Lengyel believes that
even inside the camp it was not easy to determine which women were in
the family way. For the word went around that it was extremely
dangerous to be found pregnant. Those who arrived in this condition,
therefore, hid themselves when they could and, to this end, had the
active cooperation of their neighbors.
Incredible as it may seem, “some succeeded in concealing their
conditions to the last moment, and deliveries took place
secretly in the barracks.”230
Lengyel and Weisz-Miklos both
recount incidents where women had the misfortune of going into
labor during roll call.
Ruth Elias knew firsthand the repercussions of being
pregnant in the camps.
Elias was already two months pregnant
when she entered Auschwitz.
Knowing the German policy
concerning expectant Jewish mothers, she tried to secure an
abortion for herself in the Theresienstadt ghetto, but was
228
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 70.
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 115.
230
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 115.
229
70
unable to find a doctor who was willing to take the risk of
being caught and executed by the Nazis for violating their
policies. In December 1943, Elias, Koni, and his mother were
deported to Auschwitz.
Since Elias was not yet showing any
signs of being pregnant, she passed the initial selection and
was forced to perform hard, physical labor.
While in Auschwitz,
Elias continued to try and find someone willing to perform an
abortion, but could not.
She felt she “had no choice but to
hide my condition as well as I could and wait to see what the
future would bring.”231
By the fifth month of her pregnancy, the changes in Elias’s
body had become visible.
Not wanting anyone, especially the SS,
to notice her condition, she tried to conceal her changing body
to the best of her ability.
Elias realized that all prisoners
in Auschwitz “lived under immediate threat” but knew that
“because of my pregnancy my prospects were much worse.”232
Overworked and undernourished, Elias was able to temporarily
secure an indoor job making machine-gun slings where she “could
at least sit down instead of dragging rocks back and forth.”233
At this job, she was no longer exposed to the elements and did
not have to expend as much energy.
231
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope), 115.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 117.
233
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 117.
232
71
In another stroke of good fortune, Elias recalls when the
camp hangman, Henker Fischer, ordered her to come to his barrack
one night.
Elias was afraid of him but feared the repercussions
of not showing up so she went.
When she arrived, Fischer asked
how many months along she was.
Then, to Elias’s surprise,
Fischer gave her a raw onion and a piece of bread, and ordered
her to come to his barrack every other day to get some
supplemental nutrients because she “had a responsibility for the
development of her child.”234
Alas, her good fortune was not to last.
When Elias was
eight months pregnant, she was forced to go through one of Dr
Mengele’s selections.
Naked and knowing that her belly would
send her towards death, Elias came up with a plan.
I asked a few of the women standing behind me to pass me in line.
Maybe the man in Mengele, after seeing their young bodies, would
overlook me. What I asked them to do didn’t present them with
additional risks, so the women readily agreed. And with his infamous
gesture Mengele directed all of us- including me- to the side of the
young and the healthy.235
What Elias did not realize was after this selection, she and the
other women who passed were going to be transferred to Birkenau.
After being in Birkenau for a few days, the women were ordered
to undergo a gynecological examination.
Elias felt “this would
mean certain death for me- they would surely see that I was in
the last month of my pregnancy”236 and lost all hope of
234
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 119.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 126-127.
236
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 130.
235
72
surviving.
Elias was lucky enough to pass the examination.
She
later realized that the SS “examination had nothing to do with
the state of our health.”237
Rather, “it was a search for
contraband.”238
Elias was then transferred to Hamburg, Germany to work
clearing the rubble caused by Allied bombing.
However, Elias
was not allowed to stay at this job for more than three days
because her block elder denounced her and another woman, Berta,
as being pregnant to an SS officer.
The SS officer promised to
bring them to a maternity hospital, but the women, both hardened
by their time in Auschwitz, were wary of believing him.
Elias
and Berta were taken to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an
all-women’s facility.
The day after they arrived, an
announcement was made stating “all pregnant women are to report
to the office immediately so they can be taken to the maternity
hospital.”239
Elias and Berta reported to the office but
immediately became suspicious because they “didn’t trust the
good nature of the SS.”240
Seeing no other alternative, Elias
whispered to Berta to pretend that she was going into labor so
they would not have to go with the others.
Berta, having given
birth once before, knew exactly how to fake the symptoms.
went to the camp administrator, and acting as if she was
237
Ruth
Ruth
239
Ruth
240
Ruth
238
Elias,
Elias,
Elias,
Elias,
Triumph
Triumph
Triumph
Triumph
of
of
of
of
Hope,
Hope,
Hope,
Hope,
131.
131.
136.
136.
73
Elias
ignorant, explained that her sister had just gone into labor and
could not travel in such a condition.
Elias said if the officer
would be kind enough to send them to the infirmary long enough
for Berta to give birth, they would be more than happy to join
the other prisoners the following day.
Surprisingly, the SS
woman agreed to Elias’s request.
Elias and Berta were taken back to the infirmary, while the
other pregnant women were sent “trustingly to their death.”241
The next morning an SS doctor examined Berta and found no signs
of dilation.
Berta kept to her story that she had experienced
labor pains but they had mysteriously disappeared during the
night.
The SS doctor then decided that the women should be
transferred immediately.
What Elias and Berta did not realize
was that they were being sent back to Auschwitz, which they had
left less than a week before.
Elias, trying to save herself and
her friend, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to “remove the
yellow triangles from our dresses and flush the scraps down the
toilet” of the train.242
This way, when they entered Auschwitz,
they could not be identified as Jews and hoped to receive better
treatment because of this.
Their ruse worked.
Upon entering
Auschwitz, they were sent to the infirmary in the woman’s camp.
241
242
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 137.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 138.
74
Soon after entering the infirmary, their story began to
spread.
Elias recalls,
even Mengele heard about us. He appeared in our block and ordered that
we be brought to him. We stood at rigid attention; this was the second
time I had been in such close proximity to him. He began to
interrogate us, asking us endless questions. Where were we during the
selection? Where was he standing at the time? Where were the other
doctors standing? What else had we observed there? It was probably
inconceivable to him that he, who was all-powerful in determining the
fate of the Jews at Auschwitz, had overlooked two pregnant women during
the selection process. Finally he said, “First you will deliver your
babies, then we’ll see.”243
Elias and Berta remained in the infirmary while waiting to give
birth.
While both women wanted “to get it over with,” they
“also wished to delay the moment because pregnant women got a
supplementary food ration.”244
On August 3, 1944, Elias went into labor and gave birth to
a baby girl.
When she heard the first cry of her baby, Elias
“could no longer keep back the tears” which were “an expression
of despair at the fate of my child.”245
It was for this reason
that Elias refrained from naming her daughter and only referred
to her as ‘my child.’
The next morning Dr Mengele came by and
saw that Elias had given birth.
He took one look at the child
and “directed one of the women doctors to tightly bandage”
Elias’s breasts.246
By doing this, Elias could no longer
breastfeed her baby.
She now had become an unwilling
participant in one of Dr Mengele’s experiments because he wanted
243
Ruth
Ruth
245
Ruth
246
Ruth
244
Elias,
Elias,
Elias,
Elias,
Triumph
Triumph
Triumph
Triumph
of
of
of
of
Hope,
Hope,
Hope,
Hope,
141.
143.
146.
147.
75
“to see how long a newborn infant can live without being fed.”247
A week passed, and Elias was still forbidden from feeding her
daughter.
Her baby “turned ashen-gray” and was too weak from
hunger even to whimper.248
On the seventh day, Mengele told
Elias that he would fetch her and her daughter at eight o’clock
the next morning.
Elias knew that this meant that she and her
child were destined for the gas chambers.
Elias, feeling helpless, started telling her story to a
Czech Jew named Maca, who listened and promised to help.
That
night, Maca returned to the infirmary with a hypodermic needle
filled with morphine to kill Elias’s baby.
Elias at first
resisted, “I can’t be the murderer of my own child!
give her the injection?”249
Won’t you
Maca, a former dentist, firmly
insisted that Ruth do it because she refused to break the
Hippocratic Oath.
Maca said,
Ruth, you’re young. You must stay alive. Look at your child. She
cannot live; in a few hours she will die, anyway. But she must die
before Mengele comes to pick you up. If the child is still alive when
he gets here, he’ll take you both.250
Tired of resisting and knowing that Maca’s argument made sense
because she knew that her daughter was going to die soon from
starvation anyways, Elias finally agreed.
it.
247
I killed my own child.
Ruth
Ruth
249
Ruth
250
Ruth
248
Elias,
Elias,
Elias,
Elias,
Triumph
Triumph
Triumph
Triumph
of
of
of
of
Hope,
Hope,
Hope,
Hope,
She remembers, “I did
Mengele had turned me into a child
147.
149.
150.
150.
76
murderer.”251
Aside from Maca, Elias did not tell anyone, not
even Berta, what she had done.
When Mengele arrived the next
morning and inquired about her child, Elias told him that her
daughter had died during the night.
told her, “you’re very lucky.
Mengele seemed pleased and
You will leave Auschwitz on the
next transport.”252
Elias was allowed to remain in the infirmary to support
Berta, who had not yet given birth.
When Berta’s contractions
began, both Maca and Elias were there.
The two women decided to
spare Berta the agony that Elias had endured by immediately
injecting her baby with morphine.
When Mengele came by in the
morning, the women told him that Berta’s son was stillborn.
Mengele then promised Berta that she too would be on the next
transport out of Auschwitz.
Elias’s story demonstrates how difficult it was for
pregnant women to secure abortions.
The Nazis forbade abortions
for Jewish women, though their goal was to ensure that there
would be no more Jewish births.
kill both mother and child.
Instead, they felt it easier to
Once inmates realized that
pregnancy meant certain death, “clandestine abortions and
infanticide became life saving alternatives” and some expectant
mothers in Auschwitz were able to save their own lives by
251
252
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 150.
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 152.
77
procuring illegal abortions with the help of inmate physicians
and nurses.253
However, if the SS found out about these
prisoners disregard for Nazi policy, they were immediately
executed.
Hence, access to fellow inmates who were willing to
perform these services was extremely limited.
Katharina von Kellenbach argues that “it was part of the
Nazi plan to dehumanize their victims by creating situations
which left them no moral choice.”254
The choice was between
women saving their own lives or that of one’s children.
The
will to live was thus put into conflict with one’s maternal
instinct.
Knowing the internal conflict that pregnant women
were experiencing, some rabbis reminded them that the Talmud
permits abortion, up until the moment of birth, in order to save
an expectant mother’s life.
Since Nazi policy was to kill all
expectant mothers, abortions were portrayed as life-saving
measures.
Though many women sought abortions, most were unsuccessful.
In order to save themselves, women carried their pregnancies to
term but risked giving birth in the bunkers rather than in
infirmaries, hoping to hide their babies and in this way ensure
their survival.
Nomberg-Przytyk describes one incident where
she went with Mancy, a doctor with whom she worked in the
253
254
Katharina von Kellenbach, “Reproduction and Resistance,” 21.
Katharina von Kellenbach, “Reproduction and Resistance,” 29.
78
infirmary, to witness a birth.
Mancy warned the woman about to
give birth that she was “forbidden to utter a sound”255 and
though the woman was in extreme pain she remained silent
throughout the delivery.
Though the baby was born healthy,
Mancy, like a number of other doctors and nurses working in
Auschwitz, told the mother that the child had been born
stillborn and proceeded to drown the newborn in a bucket of
water before he had a chance to cry.
Mancy then dumped the
corpse in a pile in front of the barrack ensuring the mother’s
survival.
As horrific as this seems, the euthanasia of newborn
children by prisoners was a common occurrence.
As cruel as this
must sound today, one must understand the twisted logic
expressed by the chief doctor of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele who
reportedly stated,
when a Jewish child is born, or a woman comes to camp with a child
already, I don’t know what to do with the child. I can’t set the child
free because there are no longer any Jews who live in freedom. I can’t
let the child stay in the camp because there are no facilities in the
camp that would enable the child to develop normally. It would not be
humanitarian to send a child to the ovens without permitting the mother
to be there to witness the child’s death. That is why I send the
mother and the child to the gas ovens together.256
In order to spare women from this fate, doctors, nurses, and
sometimes the mothers themselves killed babies either by
drowning or with an injection of morphine or phenol if the child
was born healthy.
255
256
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 70.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 68.
79
Olga Lengyel recounts experiences similar to NombergPrzytyk’s.
She recalls that “as soon as a baby was delivered at
the infirmary, mother and child were sent to the gas
chambers.”257
The mother was spared only if “the infant was not
likely to survive or it was stillborn.”258
The conclusion she
and other doctors drew from this “was simple: the Germans did
not want the newborn to live; if they did, the mothers too must
die.”259
Lengyel and the other doctors, tired of sending both
mother and child to their deaths, decided to try to save the
mothers.
To accomplish this, they had to pass the infants off
as stillborn without raising the suspicion of the SS.
Unfortunately,
the fate of every baby had to be the same. After taking every
precaution, we pinched and closed the little tike’s nostrils and when
it opened its mouth to breathe, we gave it a dose of a lethal product.
An injection might have been quicker, but that would have left a trace
and we dared not let the Germans suspect the truth. We placed the dead
infant in the same box which had brought it from the barrack, if the
accouchement had taken place there. As far as the camp administration
was concerned, this was a stillbirth.260
Lengyel lamented the fact that “the Germans succeeded in making
murderers of even us” and wondered if a child she had killed was
not the next “Pasteur, Mozart, or Einstein.”261
Her only
consolation was that “by these murders we saved the lives of the
mothers” and that without the intervention of the doctors the
257
Olga
Olga
259
Olga
260
Olga
261
Olga
258
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Five
Five
Five
Five
Five
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
113.
113.
113.
114.
114.
80
mothers “would have endured worse sufferings, for they would
have been thrown into the crematory ovens while still alive.”262
The Nazis, noticing the extraordinarily low birth rate,
resorted to trickery to catch pregnant women.
Similar to Ruth
Elias’s experience, Lengyel recalls the SS announcing that
“pregnant women, even such Jewesses who were still alive, would
be given special treatment” and promised expectant mothers that
they “would be allowed to remain away from roll call, receive a
larger ration of bread and soup, and be permitted to sleep in a
special barrack.”263
The SS went so far as to guarantee that
women “would be transferred to a hospital as soon as their time
came.”264
Though the Nazis did not intend to fill these
promises, many women fell for the deception and announced
themselves.
They were promptly killed.
262
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 114.
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 116.
264
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 116.
263
81
Chapter Six:
Solidarity
In a place where selfishness and self-preservation should
have reigned supreme, few women in Auschwitz held an ‘every
woman for herself’ attitude.
Instead, women stayed with their
families or befriended other female inmates and treated them as
family members, even if they were complete strangers, which
suggested a specifically female form of bonding and
solidarity.265
These relationships were designed to help women
in a number of ways, not the least of which was keeping up their
spirits.
Indeed, the solidarity and support found in these
groups often aided survival.
Since Auschwitz was designed to strip prisoners of their
individuality, families, whether surrogate or biological,
remained one place where women were seen as individuals rather
than the number tattooed on their arm.
These relationships
provided an avenue for inmates to recover their identities and
reclaim their humanity.
Indeed, many women claim that they
survived Auschwitz because the other members of their group
265
Men, in their memoirs, rarely talk about the relationships they had with
other prisoners, except occasionally in passing. Women tend to focus
extensively on these friendships in their memoirs and often credit them for
being the reason they survived Auschwitz.
82
pooled their “resources and energies, and devoted considerable
effort to helping” to make sure everyone in their family stayed
alive.266
Having other people to trust was especially important in a
place like Auschwitz where survival was based on scant physical
resources.
Membership in a family gave inmates a sense of
security and often served as protection against the theft of
food and other valuables.
For many women, staying with or “forming a family in
Auschwitz was an act of resistance at the personal level
because” it offered them “hope and support.”267
Indeed, Ami
Neiberger asserts these relationships “imbued their lives with
meaning and gave them the strength to embrace life.”268
In
addition to sharing material goods, membership in these groups
allowed women the belief that they could survive and have a
future after Auschwitz.
Indeed, Joan Ringelheim believes,
their relationships- their conversations, singing, storytelling, recipe
sharing, praying, joke telling, gossiping- helped them to transform a
world of death and inhumanity into one more act of human life.269
Acts as simple as having nightly conversations with other
inmates gave women “a way to maintain hope and community in
266
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship: Family and Survival in
Auschwitz” in Resisting the Holocaust (New York: Berg, 1998), 133.
267
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 144.
268
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 145.
269
Joan Ringelheim, “Joan Ringelheim,” in Different Voices: Women and the
Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993) 384.
83
inhumane conditions.”270
Ellen S. Fine states that this “sharing
of memory… constituted a form of resistance.”271
While Ami Neiberger believes that “risking one’s life for
another makes very little sense in the world of Auschwitz,”
women, through their memoirs, recall that it happened quite
frequently.272
Indeed, as Marlene Heinemann states, many of
these same memoirs “contain evidence” that contradicts the
assumption “about the predominance of selfishness over
cooperation” in Auschwitz.273
Instead, women often mention the
“comforting power of conversation, the saving of comrade’s
lives, or the pain of seeing others suffer.”274
It seems, as
Heinemann states, that “only the most selfish in character
became so hardened, while for many their incredible personal
suffering only increased their concern for the need of
others.”275
This was especially true for women whose immediate families
were in Auschwitz.
All of the women analyzed who had members of
their biological family with them recount the tremendous chances
they took, often risking death, to try and help their relatives
270
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers in the Holocaust
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 110.
271
Ellen S. Fine, “Women Writers and the Holocaust: Strategies for Survival”
in Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), 85.
272
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 142.
273
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 81.
274
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 81.
275
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 6.
84
survive.
For women, helping their family members, even if they
were distant relatives, provided them with a reminder of home.
This was certainly true in the case of Anita LaskerWallfisch, who found out that her sister Renate was in Auschwitz
quite by coincidence.
Lasker-Wallfisch and Renate were German
Jews but were classified by the Nazis as Karteihaftlinge, or
prisoners with a file, because both women had participated in
“helping enemies of the Reich and forging papers in order to
escape from Germany.”276
Renate, as the older sibling, was
thought to be more responsible for their crime so she was moved
to a different prison than Lasker-Wallfisch.
Soon after her
trial, Lasker-Wallfisch was forced to sign a document “to say
that I was going to Auschwitz voluntarily” and she was then
transferred.277
Upon arriving at Auschwitz, Lasker-Wallfisch, realizing
that she was going to lose her shoes anyway, gave them to
another inmate who had asked for them rather than surrender them
to the Nazis.
Her shoes were quite distinctive: black pigskin
with red laces and bobbles.
At the time, she had no idea “what
effect this transaction would have.”278
Lasker-Wallfisch had
been in Auschwitz for approximately two weeks when the same girl
to whom she had given the shoes came
276
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth: A Memoir of Survival and the
Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 65.
277
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 71.
278
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 79.
85
running into the block and asked me to come immediately to the
Reception Block with her. She said, ‘I think your sister is here…’ I
raced over and she was. It was incredible. You need to take into
account the vast size of the camp to appreciate the enormity of the
coincidence. What had happened was that my sister arrived with a
transport from Jauer and was being processed by the very person who had
processed me shortly before. Renate noticed her shoes and asked where
they came from. When she heard that they had belonged to someone who…
was now in the orchestra, she knew instantaneously that it could only
be me.279
The two sisters were overjoyed to be together again.
Unfortunately, their reunion was short-lived.
Renate, who did
not play an instrument, could not be housed in the orchestra
barrack with her sister.
Lasker-Wallfisch, as a privileged prisoner, made a
conscious decision to try and help her sister.
Risking her
life, she went to Maria Mandel, “the camp commander” and an
extremely sadistic guard, and asked her “whether it would be
possible for her (Renate) to become a Lauferin.”280
In this
position, Renate would receive “marginally better housing” and
the possibility of “better rations.”281
Mandel, creator of the
camp orchestra, surprisingly agreed to Lasker-Wallfisch’s
request.
This led Lasker-Wallfisch to believe that she could
“safely say that the cello saved not only my life but my
sister’s life as well.”282
The sisters continued to help and
support each other through the duration of the war.
279
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch,
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch,
messenger.
281
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch,
282
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch,
280
Inherit the Truth, 80.
Inherit the Truth, 80.
Inherit the Truth, 80.
Inherit the Truth, 81.
86
A Lauferin was a camp
Isabella Leitner and three of her sisters, Rachel, Cipi,
and Chicha all survived Dr. Mengele’s initial selection and
found each other inside Auschwitz even though they had been
separated in the confusion of the unloading of the cattle cars.
Upon seeing each other for the first time, Leitner recalls, “we
are so happy” even though “we look so terrible” from having
their heads shaved.283
together at all costs.
Immediately, the four women vowed to stay
Though she loved her sisters, Leitner
recalls,
to be a lone person… was perhaps a blessing. To have sisters still
alive, not to be alone, was a blessing too, but fraught with tests,
daily, hourly: When this day ends, will there still be four of us?284
Leitner feels that “if you are sisterless, you do not have the
pressure, the absolute responsibility to end the day alive.”285
Though Leitner felt that having her sisters with her in
Auschwitz was sometimes a burden, she acknowledges that she most
likely would not have survived without their help and support.
Her sisters echo her sentiment.
Leitner recalls her sister
Rachel once saying,
alone, I won’t make it. I don’t want to make it. Whatever effort I am
making now is all for you. I no longer care to live—unless, and only
if, we are together. The minute we’re separated, I’ll be on my way to
the crematorium, and that will be fine with me. You are forcing me to
stay alive…286
283
Isabella Leitner,
Crowell, 1978), 35.
284
Isabella Leitner,
285
Isabella Leitner,
286
Isabella Leitner,
Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York:
Fragments of Isabella, 44.
Fragments of Isabella, 44.
Fragments of Isabella, 45.
87
During selections, the sisters frantically tried to make each
other look healthier by pinching their cheeks “to an unnatural
redness” and having their youngest sister, Rachel, stand on her
toes so she would look older than her fifteen years.287
Ami
Neiberger theorizes, as in the case of Isabella Leitner’s sister
Rachel, that “group pressure played a significant role in
maintaining personal appearance.”288
When an individual like
Rachel no longer had the will to live, their family, much like
Leitner’s, could force them to continue in their battle for
survival.
Women realized that their appearance “was extremely
important because it influenced an individual’s attitude,
denoted status within the camp, and affected surviving a sudden
selection… for death or a labor transport.”289
Leitner and her three sisters forced each other to remain
strong during their time at Auschwitz and did not allow the
others to succumb to the temptation of becoming musselmen, or
individuals who no longer had the desire to live.
Eva Mozes Kor, unlike Leitner and Lasker-Wallfisch, did not
have to worry about being separated from her sister Miriam.
In
order for Mengele to “create the perfect race, the Master race,”
he felt he had to study twins so that he could understand their
287
Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 56.
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 139.
289
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 139.
Fine “Women Writers and the Holocaust,” 81.
288
88
See also Ellen S.
genetic make-up.290
If one twin died during an experiment, “then
the other twin was killed” and the bodies compared during an
autopsy.291
Kor, once she had this realization, recognized that
her survival was contingent on Miriam’s.
Kor believed that her sister “Miriam had been the weaker
one all along” so she felt a sense of responsibility to ensure
that Miriam survived.292
Even when Kor was injected with a drug
that brought her to the brink of death and even Mengele believed
“she… has only two weeks to live,” she continued to fight for
her life so that she and Miriam could be reunited.293
Miriam
could not visit Kor in the infirmary, but helped her to the best
of her ability by sending over her daily ration of bread once
she realized that Kor was not receiving any food.
Once Kor was
released, her happiness about being reunited with Miriam was
short-lived.
In her absence, Miriam, thinking Kor was going to
die, had become a musselmanner.
Kor knew that her “absence and
the toll of my disease had severely affected Miriam.”294
Kor
believes,
that part of the reason she was so weak, so ill was that she thought I
was not coming back. I had to help her. I believed we were the only
ones left in our family. I could not lose her.295
290
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr Mengele’s Twins: The Story of Eva
and Miriam Mozes (Terre Heute, Indiana: CANDLES Inc., 1995), 106.
291
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 107.
292
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 109.
293
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 113. To this day, Kor does not know
the substance with which she was injected.
294
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 117-118.
295
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 119.
89
It was for this reason that Kor, who was still weak from her
illness, decided to volunteer for a job working as a food
carrier so that she could organize some potatoes for her sister.
She felt that the extra food would lift Miriam’s spirits.
The
potatoes that Kor organized, in her opinion, “provided Miriam
with enough nourishment that they worked like a miracle drug on
her” and “she became healthier and more willing to fight for her
own life.”296
The two sisters continued their reliance on each
other throughout the duration of the war.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen felt a special responsibility to
ensure the survival of her sister, Danka.
Danka volunteered to
come to Auschwitz because she wanted to be with Gelissen and she
too believed the Nazi propaganda that Auschwitz was a labor
camp.
Once Gelissen saw Danka, she knew that she had found her
“reason and will to live.”297
Gelissen convinced Elza, her block
elder, to let Danka stay with her in the barrack.
Elza agreed
at the expense of another girl who was already living there.
Gelissen recognized, “this is a selfish act, but I have a sister
that I have to keep alive and that is all that matters.”298
Gelissen knew that in order to save herself and her sister prewar standards of morality were not applicable.
296
She recalls, “I
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz, 121.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
(Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 71.
298
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 72.
297
90
know I must be with my sister.
I know I must make sure she
lives; without her I cannot survive.”299
matters but” to “be with Danka.”300
For her, “nothing else
Throughout their time at
Auschwitz, Gelissen endured several beatings and punishments all
in the name of helping Danka.
Of course not all familial relationships in Auschwitz were
comprised solely of sisters.
Livia Bitton Jackson, her mother,
and her aunt Serena arrived at Auschwitz at the same time.
During their initial selection, Jackson and her mother were
separated from Serena, who was sent to the left.
Imagine
Jackson’s surprise once she entered the camp to find her cousins
Suri and Hindi, who had arrived a few days prior.
Her cousins
were excited to spot her and promised, “we will be together from
now on.”301
They rushed off to find Jackson’s mother and in the
process spotted her aunt Celia.
The women “decide to form a
family of five and vow never to be separated from each other.”302
On Jackson’s tenth day in Auschwitz, Celia informed her that she
had found a woman in Jackson’s bunker willing to switch barracks
with her.
Jackson’s cousins were “also looking for girls
willing to change places with them.”303
This way the five women
299
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 99.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 101.
301
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand
Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997),
302
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand
303
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand
300
91
Years: Growing Up in the
85.
Years, 89.
Years, 98.
could stand together during roll call. Jackson’s cousin Suri
believed,
it is much easier to survive in Auschwitz if you are five. Bread and
food is distributed in Zahlappel. Every five get one portion of bread
and one bowl of food. Those ahead of you take the first bites of bread
and the first gulps of soup. If you are tall and stand last, you get
the smallest piece of bread and the bowl may be empty by the time it
reaches you. But if you have family or friends on the line, you are
careful to share it equally.304
Suri realized that most women would not better their own life at
the expense of their family.
In her article “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” Ami
Neiberger insists that “cooperating within a group of five was
very practical”305 because as Jackson demonstrates members “would
share the soup equally,” “help prop each other up during the
long” roll calls, and “warn each other” if danger, usually in
the form of an SS officer, was approaching.306
Neiberger
believes having a ‘family’ of five was also beneficial because
occasionally, when the work parties marched through the camp gate going
to or from their assignments outside the camps, the officials would
perform a sudden inspection by standing on each side of the gate and
observing each row as it marched through. Anyone who stumbled,
tripped, or looked ill was removed and killed. Families shielded their
weaker members by strategically placing them on the inside of the row
and a few paces further from the eyes of officials.307
Of course, as Jackson later realized, in Auschwitz not every
family consisted of five members.
304
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 89.
Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 136.
305
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 136.
306
Livia Bitton Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 98.
307
Ami Neiberger, “An Uncommon Bond of Friendship,” 136.
92
See also Ami
Unfortunately, before Celia, Suri, or Hindi could move into
Jackson’s barrack, she and her mother were placed on a labor
transport to Plaszow and were unable to let the rest of their
family know what had happened to them.
When Jackson and her mother re-entered Auschwitz a few
months later, they were unable to find their relatives again so
Jackson assumed full responsibility for the well-being of her
mother.
By this time, Jackson’s mother had lost all of her will
to live.
Jackson refused to let her mother succumb to becoming
a musselman because she believed that her survival was
contingent on her mother’s.
When Jackson’s mother was badly
injured in an accident in their barrack, Heinemann demonstrates
that Jackson’s reactions to her mother’s injury and illness
“prove… that great personal courage can arise from the belief
that someone else’s survival is necessary to one’s own.”308
Jackson, risking death, visited her mother in the infirmary
every day until she heard rumors that a selection was about to
take place.
When she heard this, Jackson desperately turned to
Mrs. Grunwald and Ilse, neighbors from her native Hungary for
help.
Jackson recalls the exchange:
“I’m asking you to risk your life,” I whisper. “I need your help.”
Without a moment’s hesitation Mrs. Grunwald’s reply comes, “I’ll come.”
“I’ll come, too,” young Ilse Grunwald volunteers. I need one more
person to help me sneak Mommy out of the infirmary and carry her all
the way to our cell block. It is a dangerous undertaking- and if we
get caught we will be sent to the gas chamber. I have been warned by
308
Marlene E. Heinemann, Gender and Destiny, 105.
93
the SS commandant that I would be put to death if I so much approached
the Revier. But I have no alternative. Mommy must be smuggled out.309
Knowing she could not carry her mother to safety without the
help of one more person, Jackson enlisted Yitu, a woman who
lived in her barrack.
Jackson’s mother.
She too agreed to risk her life to help
The four women were able to successfully
sneak Jackson’s mother out of the infirmary and she passed the
subsequent selection.
Jackson, however, did not.
In her desire
to be with her mother, Jackson bypassed the SS and underwent
another selection, which she passed.
Jackson’s thoughts though
were not about her miraculous escape from death, but happiness
that “we are together, Mommy and I.
What a divine miracle.”310
Ruth Kluger, like Jackson, entered Auschwitz in the company
of her mother.
Wanting to protect her daughter, Kluger’s mother
asked her their first night in the camp, quite nonchalantly, if
the two of them should commit suicide by walking into the
electrified fence.
Kluger thought that her mother was not
serious and dismissed her proposal.
Her mother accepted her
refusal “and she never returned to her suggestion.”311
Only when
Kluger had children of her own did she “realize that one might
well decide to kill them in Auschwitz rather than wait.
309
Livia Bitton
Livia Bitton
311
Ruth Kluger,
Feminist Press
310
Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 134.
Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 143.
Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York:
at the City University of New York, 2001), 97.
94
Committing suicide is… certainly more acceptable than the
prearranged death at Birkenau.”312
Kluger’s mother never brought the topic up again.
Instead,
the two women tried to take care of each other in the best way
either of them knew how.
Kluger recalled one incident where
my mother carries soup. The enormous barrel is suspended between two
poles. All together four women carry it, two in front, two behind.
The weight is too much for my mother. I am stunned to see her this
way, her face red and the veins protruding. She must have volunteered
for the extra bowl of soup. For me. I don’t want that. Don’t do this
to me!313
Kluger and her mother did not always see eye-to-eye in the camp
and disagreed quite frequently.
Despite their differences,
Kluger expected her mother to take care of her in ways she did
not even admit to herself.
During one selection, Kluger told
the guards that she was twelve and was not selected to go with
her mother to a labor camp.
Her mother was notified that “she
would leave the camp shortly.”314
Kluger’s mother told her that
she would not leave the camp without her, and pleaded for Kluger
to try again, this time lying about her age and saying that she
was fifteen.
Kluger resisted and told her mother she would only
say that she was thirteen.
When she got back in line, a clerk
told her to lie to the guard and tell him that she was fifteen.
Kluger heeded the clerk’s advice and her number was also written
down for transfer.
Kluger acknowledges if the roles were
312
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 97.
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 102.
314
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 105.
313
95
reversed, “I wouldn’t have sacrificed myself for my mother,
though I would have considered it natural if she had stayed with
me.”315
Once the two women were moved from the Auschwitz family
camp to the women’s camp, Kluger’s mother adopted an orphan
named Susi, who was “without a soul to turn to.”316
Kluger’s
mother simply said to her, “come along and join us” which Susi
did.317
Kluger was impressed that her mother “decreed without
any fuss that this girl belonged with us, as if it was the most
natural thing in the world.”318
like she mattered.”319
Her mother “made her (Susi) feel
Kluger felt that without us Susi “would
have remained isolated; with us she was part of a family, and
was thus valuable.”320
Kluger suspects “that perhaps all three
of us can claim a share in having saved each other.”321
The women described above were part of a minority because
it was often impossible for female inmates to stay with their
biological families in Auschwitz.
Some women were deported
alone, others lost track of their family members in the
confusion of the unloading of the cattle cars, while many were
directed by the SS during the initial selection to go in one
315
Ruth
Ruth
317
Ruth
318
Ruth
319
Ruth
320
Ruth
321
Ruth
316
Kluger,
Kluger,
Kluger,
Kluger,
Kluger,
Kluger,
Kluger,
Still
Still
Still
Still
Still
Still
Still
Alive,
Alive,
Alive,
Alive,
Alive,
Alive,
Alive,
110.
122.
122.
122.
123.
123.
123.
96
direction while their relatives were sent in another.
These
conditions made it so that the women who stayed or met up with
their biological families in the camps were few in number.
Yet, the harsh conditions did not stop women from forming
surrogate families once they were inside Auschwitz.
These
groups consisted of women whose goal was to stay together at all
costs.
Only a small fraction “of these associations were based
on (loose) familial ties.”322
More frequently they consisted of
“non-relatives who behaved as surrogate family members.”323 These
families were formed so that women could help each other both
physically and emotionally.
Indeed, some historians such as
Joan Ringelheim believe that “women were able to transform their
habits of raising children or their experience of nurturing into
the care of the non-biological family.”324
As close as these women became, they knew that these
relationships were at the mercy of SS officers who could
transfer and murder inmates at will.
Not surprisingly, women
who were separated from their families tried desperately to get
back to them.
Though women tried to stay with their families at
all costs, they recognized that this was not always an
obtainable goal.
Therefore, women realized that they had to be
322
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, (New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), 176.
323
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage, 176.
324
Joan Ringelheim, “Joan Ringelheim,” 378.
97
flexible in creating or joining new families if it was no longer
possible for them to stay with their old one.
Olga Lengyel for example had no family members on whom she
could rely.
When Lengyel arrived in Auschwitz, she, like
Gelissen, believed the German propaganda that it was a work
camp.
Since she did not want her mother to be overextended,
Lengyel persuaded her to accompany Lengyel’s two sons to the
left, wanting to spare her from hard work.
had condemned her to death.
Inadvertently, she
Her husband, Miklos, was sent to
the male camp, but not long after they had arrived, “the men
were removed from the camp” and Lengyel heard no news from or
about him.325
Distraught at having lost her entire family,
Lengyel was ready to commit suicide by taking the poison she had
hidden in her boot.
Before she could kill herself, Lengyel, a
surgical assistant in the pre-war era, was assigned to work as a
doctor in the camp infirmary.
She and other members of the
infirmary staff bonded in the evenings “pondering the chances
for liberation and endlessly analyzing the latest developments
in the war.”326
Other nights, they
reminisced, speaking of the ones who were dear to us, or simply
discussing the tormenting problems of the day such as should we or
should we not condemn the newborn to death in order to save the poor
mothers. We even recited poetry to lull ourselves into a calm state of
mind to forget, to escape the frightful present.327
325
Olga Lengyel, Five
(Chicago: Ziff Davis
326
Olga Lengyel, Five
327
Olga Lengyel, Five
Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Stories of Auschwitz,
Publishing Company, 1947), 44.
Chimneys, 72.
Chimneys, 72.
98
For Lengyel, these twelve women became her surrogate family.
Like any family, they “laughed together…, cried together” and
had their “differences of opinion,” but were willing to “make
sacrifices for each other.”328
Lengyel a reason to survive.
Ultimately, these women gave
They kept her spirits up when she
was depressed and their selflessness, even in the harsh world of
Auschwitz, gave her a reason to believe that she could have a
good life after Liberation.
Though her sister Renate was also in Auschwitz, Anita
Lasker-Wallfisch did not live in the same barrack as her and
could not see her as often as she wanted.
For these reasons,
she created a surrogate family consisting of some of the other
members of the orchestra.
Their shared isolation from the other
inmates created “a feeling of being together ‘in the same shit’
and firm friendships were formed.”329
Lasker-Wallfisch believes,
it is very important not to underestimate the mutual support we gave
one another. I think we all contributed a little to each other’s
survival. We watched everyone and bullied people when… we noticed the
first signs of slacking in personal hygiene.330
Lasker-Wallfisch remembers the time when she was ill with
jaundice.
Unable to “endure the eternal turnip soup any
longer,” her friends “fished out whatever bits of potato they
could find… and gave them to me,” which was a tremendous
328
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 147, 150.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 83.
330
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 83.
329
99
sacrifice.331
The bonds that Lasker-Wallfisch formed with these
women were so strong that “most of us kept in touch over all the
years that have passed since the war.”332
Ruth Elias arrived in Auschwitz with no family other than
her husband, Koni.
Elias’s immediate family had been deported
from the Theresienstadt ghetto over a year before and she had
heard rumors from fellow inmates that they had been killed in
the gas chambers.
Though Elias and Koni initially “got together
every evening after work on the camp street,” Elias “soon began
to feel a sense of estrangement” from Koni because he was not
interested in her pregnancy.333
During her first period of
internment in Auschwitz, Elias mentions no friends other than
her husband.
It was only after she was briefly transferred to
Hamburg, Germany and then to the Ravensbruck concentration camp
that she befriended another pregnant woman named Berta.
When Elias and Berta returned to Auschwitz, the two women
were taken to the camp infirmary where Josef Mengele waited for
them to give birth.
Though both women had healthy babies, Elias
risked her life and injected both newborns with morphine in
order to save her and Berta’s lives.
Mengele, happy that both
children died, allowed both women to be transferred together to
Taucha, a “labor camp satellite of the Buchenwald concentration
331
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 83.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, 83.
333
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel
(New York: John Wiley, 1998), 118.
332
100
camp.”334
The two women managed to stay together through the
duration of the war.
After Liberation, when they returned to
their native Czechoslovakia, Elias stayed with Berta in her
apartment until she could find one of her own.
Like Elias, Lucille Eichengreen’s family had been deported
from the Lodz ghetto and killed before she was deported to
Auschwitz.
named Elli.
In the ghetto, Eichengreen had befriended a girl
In Auschwitz, the two women were fortunate enough
to be assigned to the same barrack.
During their first night,
their Kapo, Maja informed them that in the morning they “would
line up outside for Appell (in) straight rows of five, in
alphabetical order.”335
This information was a cause for alarm
because Eichengreen and Elli “wanted to be able to stay together
and face whatever fate might await us.”336
Eichengreen then had
an idea.
“We’ll stand with the S group,” I suggested. “They have no records of
our names, and we no longer have papers. If they should ask, I’ll tell
them that I was married to your brother in the ghetto. They can’t
prove anything now.” Elli did not look convinced. “But what if they
find out somehow?” Finally, she nodded a reluctant agreement. I was
relieved, and the other three in our group followed my suggestion, each
thinking of a name that started with an S.337
Her plan initially worked, but soon after their arrival there
was a selection.
The five women marched past the SS together,
334
Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope, 162.
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San
Francisco, California: Mercury House, 1994), 97.
336
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 97.
337
Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life, 97.
335
101
but only Eichengreen and Elli were sent to the right.
The two
women were transferred to a labor camp in Germany together.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk had a different kind of family in
Auschwitz.
Though she had been raised as a Hasidic Jew, she
self-identified as a Communist.
Upon arrival in Auschwitz,
conditions were so bad in her barrack that Nomberg-Przytyk
decided to commit suicide.
The day before she was set to kill
herself a fellow Communist, Sonia, with whom Nomberg-Przytyk had
previously been imprisoned, came to see her and promised to get
her out of her barrack by the following day.
Sonia also
promised to “organize a warm sweater and boots” as well as food
for her.338
Before Sonia had an opportunity to make good on her
promises, Nomberg-Przytyk’s barrack was chosen to undergo a
selection.
Weak from her journey to Auschwitz, Nomberg-Przytyk
did not think that she would pass.
Suddenly, an “angel” came
and took Nomberg-Przytyk away before it was her turn to be
examined.339
Curious about whom this girl was since Nomberg-
Przytyk had never seen her before, the girl explained that she
too was a friend of Sonia and had saved Nomberg-Przytyk as a
favor to her.
Sonia’s motto was, “Do you know why I came here?
To find friends and help them as much as we can.
338
We are not
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 23.
339
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 31.
102
without means, even in this hell.”340
This statement
demonstrates the lengths that women were willing to go to help
each other, even if meant making one’s life slightly less
comfortable.
Nomberg-Przytyk’s help from her Communist ‘family’ did not
end there.
After she was saved from the selection, she ran into
another friend Masza, “a slightly rebellious Communist,” who
also promised “in a few days, we’ll get you out of here.”341
True to her word, several days later Nomberg-Przytyk was
summoned to the infirmary.
It seemed Masza had convinced Orli,
a German Communist who was a Lagerälteste, to give NombergPrzytyk a job as a clerk.
Nomberg-Przytyk upon hearing this
thought to herself, “maybe this was the help from my friends
that I had been waiting for.”342
Orli, it seemed, commonly used
her position to help her fellow comrades.
The other women in
the infirmary with whom Nomberg-Przytyk became close were
predominantly Communists as well.
The women bonded like any
real family would, and were not afraid to take chances for each
other, such as organizing a New Year’s Eve celebration in 1944.
Though Nomberg-Przytyk was wearing a yellow Star of David
instead of a red triangle, the help she received from fellow
340
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 24.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 30.
342
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 36.
341
103
travelers meant the difference between life and death on more
than one occasion.
104
Chapter Seven:
Lesbians
Sometimes the friendships that women made with other women
developed into something more.
Though none of the authors
examined admit partaking in any homosexual activity, lesbian
relationships did exist in Auschwitz and were more common than
generally acknowledged.
Joan Ringelheim asserts that women’s
attitudes in their memoirs “toward lesbian relationships in the
camps seem at best ambiguous or ambivalent.”343
Part of the
reason for this is during the post-war era “lesbians were
socially ostracized into silence.”344
Until recently, it
remained taboo for women survivors to discuss “love (and)
sexuality… between women” when writing about their experiences
in Auschwitz.345
Therefore, few female survivors wrote memoirs
that contained lesbian content.
For historians, it is problematic determining what
constitutes a lesbian.
Claudia Schoppmann, in Days of
343
Joan Ringelheim, “Joan Ringelheim,” in Different Voices: Women and the
Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 377.
344
R. Amy Elman, “Lesbians and the Holocaust,” in Women and the Holocaust:
Narrative and Representation (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America,
1999), 9.
345
R. Amy Elman, “Lesbians and the Holocaust,” 9.
105
Masquerade, acknowledges that “the lowest common denominator is
their love of women.”346
Schoppmann wonders,
should the term pertain only to a sexual practice, which normally
cannot be proven anyway, or to a lifestyle in which the political,
intellectual, emotional, and sexual energies of a woman are directed
toward other women? Or should the term lesbian be used to refer only
to women who define themselves as such?347
This is often problematic because many members of the older
generations are reluctant to self-identify as such.
As R. Amy
Elman states, historians focusing on women in the Holocaust
are forced to, “read between the lines.” This does not mean that one
discovers lesbians where none exists. Rather, marriage and other
public postures notwithstanding, one is especially careful to avoid
presumptions of heterosexuality. After all, assertions of
heterosexuality, however minimal, have frequently furnished many gays
and lesbians with protection from identification, arrest, and
sometimes, even death.348
Women persecuted as lesbians by the Nazis, regardless of their
‘race’ or religion, were sent to Auschwitz and other
concentration camps marked as ‘asocials’ along with thieves,
murderers, and prostitutes.
Unlike gay men, lesbians in the
camps did not compose a distinct category of prisoners.
Instead, lesbians, along with all other Nazi deemed ‘asocials’
were marked with a black triangle on their clothing.
R. Amy
Elman believes “few recollections of lesbian persecution exist…
because lesbians were not as readily identifiable” as gay men,
346
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the
Third Reich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 24.
347
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade, 25.
348
R. Amy Elman, “Lesbians and the Holocaust,” 10. See also Schoppmann, Days
of Masquerade, 25. Adrienne Rich also makes this argument in “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
106
whose pink triangles “exclusively signified their ‘crime’.”349
This is because, for the Nazis, lesbianism was not as serious of
a threat to an Aryan future as male homosexuality.
Schoppmann
notes that “there was no criminal persecution of lesbians,
whereas approximately 50,000 men were convicted under Paragraph
175 of the Criminal Code,” 10,000 to 15,000 thousand of whom
were interned in concentration camps.350
Male homosexuality was
punished more harshly in part because the “majority of Nazis
believed that female sexuality did not represent a threat to the
German national community.”351
Due to the fact that it was very difficult to tell who in
the ‘asocial’ group was a lesbian, and that there are no
concrete figures on the number of lesbians sent to Auschwitz,
lesbian activity in the camps is often explained away “as an act
of desperation for women lacking in ‘male companionship’.”352
Others, including Sybil Milton, feel that many instances of
lesbian activity occurred because “traditional anxieties and
guilt about sex were not applicable in the world of total
349
R. Amy Elman, “Lesbians and the Holocaust,” 11. The Nazis believed that
lesbians were less of a threat to an Aryan future than gay men. Their belief
was that lesbians could continue having sex with men and procreating, but
male homosexuals could not. This was important to the Nazis because they
wanted as many Aryan babies as possible born in order to continue the Third
Reich. Gay men were seen as traitors because they were not performing their
‘duty’ by not having children.
350
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade, 10. Paragraph 175 made homosexual
activity between men punishable.
351
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade, 15.
352
R. Amy Elman, “Lesbians and the Holocaust,” 14.
107
subservience reinforced by terror in the camps.”353
For example,
Vera Laska believes,
as in prisons, in concentration camps women who would otherwise regard
lesbianism with abhorrence could gradually slide into the acceptance of
such liaisons.354
Laska however acknowledges, “this was mostly true in the cases
of couples where one of the lovers was in a privileged
position.”355
Many female survivors, including Isabella Leitner,
have the tendency to mention lesbianism exclusively in relation
to power.
Laska would agree with Leitner to some extent,
stating
if a woman had a position of eminence within the camp hierarchy, such
as a block senior or Kapo, with separate quarters, chances were better
for such friendships to evolve into a sexual relationship.356
Yet, there were no doubt hundreds of lesbian relationships
in Auschwitz between equals.
Often, these relationships could
not be distinguished from the close friendships that many women
shared.
Laska believes that more of these relationships would
have existed if it was not for “the ever-present fear of
punishment and the lack of privacy for physical love making” not
to mention “the fear of being discovered, ridiculed, or beatenup by bed partners.”357
It is for this reason that Schoppmann
353
Sybil Milton, “Sybil Milton,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust
(New York: Paragon House, 1993), 231.
354
Vera Laska, “Vera Laska” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New
York: Paragon House, 1993), 263.
355
Vera Laska, “Vera Laska,” 263.
356
Vera Laska, “Vera Laska,” 263.
357
Vera Laska, “Vera Laska,” 264.
108
asserts “the number of women who were subjected to the horrors
of the concentration camps because they were lesbians cannot be
documented.”358
She believes that “most lesbians were spared a
fate in the camps… if they were willing to conform” and act as
if they were heterosexual.359
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk describes the social taboo of
homosexuality in that era by stating, “only in the camp was it
possible to find such affection among women.”360
While inmates
were often “repelled by… flirtations,”361 lesbian relationships,
according to Nomberg-Przytyk, were loathed primarily when one of
the females in the relationship was a Nazi.
Inmates who
willingly entered into relationships with Nazi leaders, such as
Irma Griese, were the most reviled women in the camps for
breaking not one but two social taboos.
For example, Isabella Leitner’s descriptions of her
experiences with lesbianism in Auschwitz were limited to what
happened with her sister, Chicha, who was pursued by Irma
Griese.
Leitner recalls of Griese that “it is said that Chicha
appeals to her.”362
Yet, these feelings only manifested
themselves “in the fact that she always recognizes her and
358
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade, 23.
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade, 23.
360
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 4.
361
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 92.
362
Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 50.
359
109
tortures her more than others” for refusing to enter into a
sexual relationship with her.363
Rena Kornreich Gelissen was personally propositioned by
someone in a position of authority, Erika, who was a Kapo.
Initially, Erika approached Gelissen and asked if Gelissen
wanted “to come and see our block.”364
Gelissen, thinking that
this was a strange request, said she could not because she was
Jewish and not allowed in Erika’s block.
Erika persistently
informed Gelissen that she would “take the responsibility” if
Gelissen was caught.365
Gelissen, not wanting to anger Erika,
finally agreed to accompany her to her barrack.
Once Gelissen
entered Erika’s room, Erika asked her “have you ever loved a
woman?”366
course.
Gelissen misunderstood the question and said “of
I love my mama and my sister.”367
Erika then asked if
Gelissen would like to spend the night with her.
Gelissen,
though tempted by the offer of clean sheets and warm blankets,
politely refused saying that her sister Danka would be too
worried about her.
Erika laughed and said,
“You go back to your block. You’re not ready for this.” She leads me
to the door. “Here.” She slips me an extra piece of bread. I take it
quickly, not understanding why she would offer me such a nicety, not
comprehending anything that has just happened.368
363
Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz, (New York:
Cromwell, 1978), 50-51.
364
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
(Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 87.
365
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 87.
366
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 88.
367
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 88.
368
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 88.
110
Unlike Gelissen, other women chose to enter into sexual
relationships with their superiors for comfort and to ensure
themselves one extra plate of bread or bowl of soup everyday.
Nomberg-Przytyk claims that inmates had mixed feelings about
these relationships.
An example of this is the relationship
between her blokowa, Ania, and her lover Liza.
Though the women
on her block acknowledged that Ania always treated them fairly,
they still knew that she would always “manage to reserve a warm
and comfortable place to sleep and a plate of thick soup for
herself and her darling Liza.”369
This affection led Ania to
“feed and dress her; she did all the hard work for her” which
led to feelings of resentment from the other women in her
barrack.370
Olga Lengyel, unlike most women survivors, describes
lesbianism in Auschwitz in some length, which is surprising
because Five Chimneys was published in 1947.
Lengyel recalls
that “love, or what passed for it in the degraded atmosphere of
the death camp, was but a distortion of what it is for normal
people.”371
Unlike other survivors who believe that their libido
was lowered in Auschwitz, Lengyel feels “the constant nervous
tension under which we lived did little to depress our
369
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 4.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 4.
371
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz,
(Chicago: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1947), 195.
370
111
desires.”372
On the contrary, “the mental anguish seemed to
provide a peculiar stimulus.”373
Lengyel recalls,
as in all prisons, Birkenau had its perverts. Among the women there
were three categories. Those who were lesbians by instinct formed the
least interesting group. More troublesome was the second
classification, which included women who, because of abnormal
conditions, suffered changes in their sexual viewpoint. Often they
yielded under the pressure of necessity. In the third category were
those who… discovered their lesbian predilections through an
association with corruption. This was encouraged by the “dance
soirees” that were sometimes organized in the Dantesque world of
Birkenau.374
Lengyel believes that during “these orgies the couples who
danced together gradually became attached to each other.”375
Eventually “some of the women assumed male attire to lend
an air of reality to the proceedings.”376
Lengyel recalls one
occasion when she wondered, “what is a man doing in this place?
For she looked exactly like a male.”377
When Lengyel questioned
another inmate, she was surprised to find out “this man is not a
man- ‘He’ is a she!”378
This same individual later tried to
pursue Lengyel, who on one occasion lamented, “I actually had to
run to escape her.”379
Though Lengyel insists that she never
partook in the dances, she acknowledges she was often “awakened
by kisses and caresses” from her admirer until it got to the
point where she was afraid to sleep while a dance was
372
Olga
Olga
374
Olga
375
Olga
376
Olga
377
Olga
378
Olga
379
Olga
373
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Lengyel,
Five
Five
Five
Five
Five
Five
Five
Five
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
Chimneys,
195.
195.
197-198.
198.
198.
198.
198.
198.
112
occurring.380
Though the other women in her barrack “were amused
by her ardent courtship,” Lengyel was not.381
She later admits
that perhaps her “disgust was groundless under the
circumstances” because she understood the need for human contact
and companionship.382
380
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 199.
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 199.
382
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 199.
381
113
Chapter Eight:
Conclusions
Though these eleven women were liberated from Auschwitz
over sixty years ago, they have never been able to fully leave
this chapter of their life behind.
Auschwitz follows them
wherever they go, no matter how hard they may have tried to
forget their experiences there.
Regardless of what path their
lives were taking prior to their internment, after Liberation
their plans changed drastically.
Most of these women, in their
memoirs, shared some details of their lives after the war.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk
Following Liberation, Nomberg-Przytyk immediately returned
to her native Poland.
On her way to Lublin, she excitedly told
a soldier “I am rushing back to my country because they are
building a Socialist state there.”383
Though excited that Poland
had a Communist government, Nomberg-Przytyk was warned by this
soldier not to tell the people she meets that she is a Communist
because she could suffer violent repercussions.
Nomberg-Przytyk
married and stayed in Poland until October 1968, when she was
383
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from A Grotesque Land (Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 156.
114
forced to leave for undisclosed reasons.
She immigrated to
Israel, where she stayed until 1975 when she left for Canada to
be with the eldest of her two sons.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen
On July 29, 1947, Gelissen married John Gelissen, the Dutch
commander of the Red Cross Relief Team No. 10.
immigrated to the United States.
together.
In 1954, they
They had four children
Each year, John gives Gelissen “red and white
carnations to celebrate the anniversary of… liberation.”384
He
writes, “this day is more important than your birthday… because
without this day there would be no birthdays to celebrate.”385
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
Lasker-Wallfisch, unlike most survivors who wanted to
return to their home countries, had no desire to return to her
native Germany.
Immediately after she was her liberation from
Bergen-Belsen, she took a job as an official interpreter for the
British army, though her English was limited.
During the
Lüneburg Trial, she acted as a witness for the prosecution and
testified against prominent Nazi figures in the camps including
Griese and Klein.
On March 18, 1946, she was finally allowed to
immigrate to England to be with her sister Marianne, which she
had been attempting to do since the 1930s.
384
In 1949, she became
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
(Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 268.
385
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 268.
115
a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra.
She married
Peter Wallfisch and has two children.
Eva Mozes Kor
Immediately after the war, Kor and Miriam moved to Romania
and lived with an aunt.
While there, Kor became active in the
Communist Party, until she was told she “was not supposed to
think.”386
Israel.
In 1950, Kor, Miriam, and her aunt immigrated to
In 1952, Kor was drafted into the Israeli army and
became a sergeant-major.
In 1960, she married an American
Holocaust survivor and immigrated to the United States, where
she had two children.
In 1984, she formed CANDLES Inc., an
organization dedicated to finding the medical records of the
Mengele twins.
Though she has publicly forgiven Mengele, much
to the chagrin of other survivors, Kor realizes that “the echoes
from Auschwitz (will) haunt me and influence me for the rest of
my life.”387
Livia Bitton Jackson
In 1951, Jackson and her mother, hoping for a fresh start,
immigrated to America, though Jackson would rather have moved to
Israel.
Jackson earned a PhD in Jewish History and Hebrew
Culture at New York University.
She is a professor of Hebrew
and Judaic Studies at the Herbert H Lehman College of the City
386
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes of Auschwitz: Dr Mengele’s Twins: The Story of Eva
and Miriam Mozes (Terre Heute, Indiana: CANDLES Inc., 1995), 175.
387
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes of Auschwitz, 184.
116
University of New York.
She holds dual citizenship with Israel
and the United States.
Sophie Weisz Miklos
In 1949, Miklos and her husband immigrated to the United
States.
For a long time she suffered night terrors and
eventually checked herself into a psychiatric hospital to help
herself recover from the horrors she suffered in the
concentration camps.
She feels that it took her “ten years to
regain her health completely.”388
Miklos, after being asked to
speak about her experiences, received such a positive response
from her audience that she continued to share her stories with
children at various schools and temples.
Ruth Kluger
In 1947, Kluger immigrated to the United States.
She
attended Hunter College and then earned a PhD from University of
California at Berkley.
She married an American soldier, who had
participated in D-Day, and they had one son before getting
divorced.
Kluger is a professor of German at the University of
California in Irvine.
To this day, she still considers Susi to
be her sister.
388
Sophie Weisz Miklos, Paper Gauze Ballerina: Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor
(Lincoln, Nebraska: Authors Choice Press, 1998), 64.
117
Ruth Elias
After the war, Elias returned to Czechoslovakia with Berta
and Kurt, a man she had fallen in love with at Taucha.
Since
Berta had an apartment in Prague before the war, Elias stayed
with her until she could find housing of her own, which was
difficult because Czechoslovakia was having a housing shortage.
Several months later, Elias was surprised to find out that Koni,
her estranged husband whom she had thought had perished in
Auschwitz, was alive.
divorcing him.
Elias decided to tell Koni that she was
She and Kurt moved in together, and as soon as
they confirmed that Kurt’s wife and child had perished in the
camps, they married.
In 1949, due to the political situation in
Czechoslovakia, they decided to immigrate to Israel.
They had
two sons, who they agreed not to tell about their past because
they wanted them to grow up without being burdened with their
memories.
Lucille Eichengreen
After the war, Eichengreen went to Paris, trying to obtain
a visa so that she could immigrate to the United States.
After
arriving in New York, by chance she met Dan Eichengreen, the son
of two of her closest friends in the Lodz ghetto.
Dan and
Eichengreen fell in love and were married on November 7, 1946.
They had two sons together.
118
Isabella Leitner
After the war, Leitner immigrated to America.
She married
and had two sons, Peter and Richard, who she vows to teach “to
love life, to respect man, and to hate only one thing- war.”389
Final Thoughts
As the above histories demonstrate, these women’s
experiences after Liberation were just as varied as their time
in Auschwitz.
While they were imprisoned, they all shared the
double burden of being persecuted for both their ‘race’ and
their sex.
Sixty years after Liberation, these women’s experiences in
Auschwitz continue to live on through their memoirs, even if the
authors have since died.
Through the lens of these testimonies,
individuals who were not in the camps are able to have an idea
of what daily life was like for Jewish women.
Each of these
individuals had a unique experience that deserves to be
remembered and commemorated in its own right.
Yet, by examining
their memoirs collectively, historians are able to better gauge
what daily life was like for Jewish female inmates as a whole.
Yet, as this thesis demonstrates, many of women’s experiences in
Auschwitz were extremely similar to those of men.
Both men and
women were forced to undergo the threat of daily violence and
389
Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York,
Crowell, 1978), 106.
119
humiliations, the lack of adequate food and water, and their
daily life was similar.
Yet, as this thesis demonstrates,
similar experiences in Auschwitz were not identical.
Women were
forced to deal with the Nazi’s sex specific policies that
targeted them both as women and as mothers.
They had no control
over their reproductive rights, and were constantly worried
about the threat of infertility after the war.
In addition,
women had different survival techniques than men did and
depended on the surrogate families they formed to help them
survive Auschwitz.
Only by examining memoirs written by Jewish women and
seeing how their experiences were both similar and different
from other inmates will historians stop assuming men can speak
for all Auschwitz survivors.
It may have been the same hell,
but the conditions and challenges faced while there were not
identical.
120
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Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988.
---.
The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning.
New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993.
Films
Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State.
Laurence Rees. 300 minutes.
2005. DVD.
127
Directed by
British Broadcasting Company,